People Get Ready

It was aggravation with problems like this that eventually forced me to start looking for a new blog host back in November.

I was also becoming exasperated by what seemed like degraded search engine performance. I couldn’t search my pages to accurately find and reference old Blogger posts. That might be due to the fact that Blogger publishes actual web pages rather than dynamically creating them on the fly from a database.

Blogger was supposed to improve with Google’s upgrade, but I was still seeing problems.

Apparently there are others who haven’t been happy with the Blogger upgrade.

I wasn’t happy with Wordpress.com because it doesn’t allow users to edit the raw pages to insert javascript for counters and such, so I decided to stick with Wordpress (.org, which is the open source blog solution rather than the host), but look for my own web host. After some difficulties with a new web hosting service, things are running smoothly now. The Wordpress import tool is a beautifully simple device for moving posts from one blog to another. It even detects if a post was previously imported to prevent duplicates if the import process is run more than once.

Fortunately, I got out of Blogger just in time to salvage my posts. Wordpress now says that their import process isn’t working with the new Google Blogger upgrade.

Note that the new version of Blogger (formerly Blogger Beta) does not work with the WordPress import script. If you login to Blogger with a Gmail address rather than simply a username, you are using the new Blogger, and the importer will not work. There is a workaround, but it’s complicated.

I still have posts locked up in Blogger at Plan For Serendipity, but I’ll figure out a way to get those.

Here’s where I ran into a snag importing pages. I discovered that the Wordpress import tool has a a small 2 MB limitation. Back in late November or early December (before the Blogger upgrade) I ran the import tool in Wordpress.com. That ran smoothly, although it took an anxious hour churning away to complete. I exported the entire Wordpress blog to an xml file so that I could import it into a new host domain (jockamofeenanay.com). Unfortunately, the xml file was over 9 MB. I tried to change the php.ini file to accomodate larger uploads, as suggested in other forums. Unfortunately, it took a long time to realize that I typed the directives incorrectly, using an “MB” instead of an “M” for the megabyte size. These are corrected directives:

memory_limit=100M
post_max_size=20M
upload_max_filesize=50M
max_execution_time=600

I didn’t check to see if these directives actually worked to allow larger xml imports. I didn’t have the answer I needed before I found another solution. I can confirm, however, that these directives aren’t causing any problems now, so I think they’re working.

The solution I ultimately followed was to break up the Wordpress xml file into smaller pieces, and import the pieces separately. Again, fortunately, the Wordpress import tool facilitates this by checking to make sure duplicate posts aren’t being allowed.

So that’s my story. It ain’t pretty, or interesting, but it’s done. I hope this helps other people getting ready to make a switch.

Now I can finally edit my pages, update all those juicy links I left behind in the Blogger PGR, and get on with blogging here.

By the way, don’t worry — after you update your links to the new PGR, I promise I won’t be making any more changes for a very, very long time.