You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for awhile. Don’t worry, I’m not a blog abandoner, I have been investing my blogging time in transferring my blog from blogger to Movable Type, and it has been a much more involved process than I had anticipated. If you’ve been considering making the move, I suggest that if you are in fact going to do it, do it as soon as possible.
To do so, I had to:
- Switch my hosting from Go Daddy to FatCow, for one, because FatCow is much less confusing, but also because they provide a cgi-bin. Movable Type requires CGI.
- Import my Blogger content. This involved changing all of my Blogger settings so that all of my posts would show up on one page. The fun part was manually inserting all of the comments into the resulting file, which was then imported into Movable Type. Some of the dates, orders, and times of my comments may not be entirely accurate because of this. Sorry.
- Build my Movable Type templates. Instead of one template, like Blogger, Movable Type has several. I tried to battle error-prone redundancy with PHP includes, but anything that contains Movable Type tags must be in the template itself.
- Make sure my old archive files wouldn’t be indexed by search engines anymore. Blogger and Movable Type use different naming conventions for their files, so posts with the same title as before, have different filenames, since I changed the location of my archives to /blog/archives/, just in case I ever have to move the index of my blog to /blog/, I simply disallowed my old archive directories with my robots.txt file.
So, now my blog is operational again, but there are still a few more things that need to be done:
- Refine my templates and stylesheets. Things are still a bit messy, visually.
- Review the semantic markup. I noticed that MT makes the date an
h2and the post title anh3. That’s ridiculous! Maybe I’ll get a better search ranking next time someone searches for “October.” Didn’t notice if Blogger did it any differently, however. - Categorize my posts. That “Categories” header looks pretty dorky all alone.
- Make a seperate “portfolio” blog. I need to get more of my GD work up here. I’ll add a tab above once its started up.
- Get a Google AdSense account. Maybe I can cover 1% of that hefty $99/year hosting plan.
I’m sure there’s much more, but I’m glad this Blogging thing is workiing out. Blogger was a good, low-risk, low-maintenance way to get started. I just hope MT won’t prove to be too much work for me to ever post.
Renee said,
October 20, 2004 @ 3:40 pm
Any particular reason you opted for MT? It seems like a lot of MTers are going to WordPress. I’m content to slack on Blogger awhile more.
kadavy said,
October 20, 2004 @ 11:37 pm
I, sorry to admit, went to MT for the same reason that people go out to dinner at Applebees…because I don’t have a clue, and it’s everywhere. I guess if I find something better, I can always switch, again.
Like I say, if you’re thinking of switching, do so right away. I can’t tell you what hell it is to manually insert all of those comments.
Adrian said,
October 21, 2004 @ 2:03 pm
I think losing Blogger is a good idea for anyone willing to invest the time it takes to learn Movable Type. I looked into WordPress, and that was a tempting option, but since MT was working I stuck with it. Eventually I will have to fork out some cash and upgrade to 3.11.
I can’t remember how I set it up, but I didn’t have to install it in a cgi-bin. I know it isn’t as secure, but it is such a pain switching between hosting companies. Good luck in the transition. I think you will really like MT once you get up and running.
Mr Adsense said,
February 23, 2006 @ 3:06 am
Get a Google AdSense account. Maybe I can cover 1% of that hefty $99/year hosting plan.
Nice one
Alex said,
March 6, 2006 @ 2:28 pm
Anyone have any idea what it would require to move my existing MT blog (actually, just the design) over to Blogger?
Yes, you read that correctly. I want to switch from MT to Blogger. I had a custom MT template created for me by a designer who is no longer in the business, and it is so technical that most of the features that once made it desirable are now useless to me (Trackback spam got so bad that I just disabled Trackbacks, I have no clue how to use plug-ins, update MT or make simple changes to my template, etc.). Meanwhile, my wife is on blogger and has no problem doing most anything, because it’s all there.
Anyone have any ideas?