Can you see us?

We’re here at the all-new ylcf.org.  Can you see us?  We can see you!

I’m loving the option of creating a “Child Theme” in WordPress, instead of editing all the other theme files.  I’m grateful for forums where others have supplied coded solutions that I can cut and paste, so I can get by without any PHP knowledge.  I’m thrilled to discover FireBug, so I can inspect every little element of related code that I want–and even tweak it–without ever leaving the best browser ever, FireFox.  And I don’t know where I’d be without htaccess redirects (though they’re still not all working–but we’re working on that I think they’re all working now!) and handy-dandy WordPress plugins that make life even easier.

Most of all, I’m thankful for friends who provide feedback, inspiration, help, and encouragement along the way.  And for two wonderfully patient husbands who fed and bathed children last night while their wives exchanged dozens of “how does it look?” emails (Ashleigh was putting the finishing touches on the logo as I made the site switch).

P.S. Technical details on the steps I took migrating from Blogger to WordPress will be added to this post later (when it’s not hanging out on the main page any more), so if anyone is looking for help in that area, bookmark and check back soon. (This isn’t a technical blog, so I didn’t want to clutter up everyone’s page with what’s Greek to most!)

Post Addendum: What I Learned While Migrating to WordPress

This is not a technical blog.  Nor will it ever be.  But it is a blog about help and encouragement.  Thus, I take a moment to go technical on you–skip the rest if you’re not interested in switching from Blogger to WordPress.org.

A month ago I was searching for help on migrating from Blogger to WordPress.org.  For every search result in Google, there was a different list of suggestions.  None of them actually applied to me in their entirety.  And since I already owned my own domain and hosting, some of the solutions seemed rather ridiculous (I did not want meta redirects, or to add lines to my Blogger template to redirect each page).  So I had to figure it out one step at a time.  I’m sharing what I learned, and the migration steps I took, in the hopes that it might help someone else like me who’s searching for help on changing over from Blogger to WordPress.  No guarantees it will work for anyone but me, but hopefully it will help you figure out your own situation.

Before we go any further, though–why are you switching to WordPress.org?  I really, really liked Blogger.  The only reason we switched ylcf.org over to WordPress was so we could have pages and blog posts.  I’m sure I’ll learn to love WordPress’ many other customizable features.  But so far, I miss a lot of Blogger’s automation.  Some of which, of course, could be found in WordPress.com–while, granted, losing much of the customizability.  The truth is, Blogger does everything for you, but with WordPress.org, you have to do everything.  Which would mean Blogger is like our government is and WordPress.org is like the founders intended it to be.  But moving right along…  (This isn’t a political blog, either.)

One more note: WordPress’ support pages are woefully out of date.  If you’re dealing with any third party site (such as FeedBurner) where you can look for help, look there first: it will probably be years more recent, and 100% easier, than it appears on wordpress.org/support.  Otherwise, if it’s really a WordPress issue, and the support file doesn’t help, check the forums.  The people there are helpful.

That being said, here’s the steps I took to switch to WordPress.  My situation was this: I’d long had a Blogger blog hosted on my own subdomain at http://blog.ylcf.org.  I want my new WordPress.org blog to be at http://ylcf.org.  This is how I got from there to here.

1. I installed WordPress in a test directory, ylcf.org/wordpress.  Thanks to our host GoDaddy, it was an automatic application installation.  There are other hosts who provide the same wonderful feature, all linked on WordPress.org’s site.
2. I installed the plugins I wanted, chose a Theme and designed a Child Theme (a way to customize your WP theme without making changes to the original theme files), and pretty much got everything just the way I wanted it in that test directory.
3. A note on plugins–don’t search for a plugin, but instead browse through the most popular ones.  If you have FeedBurner, visit their support site to find the link to the current FeedSmith plugin so you can continue to use your FeedBurner feed with WordPress (at the time I installed it, the FeedSmith plugin was not in the WordPress plugin directory–but “FeedBurner FeedSmith” is what you want).  There’s a great Google Analytics for WordPress plugin to allow you to easily use Google Analytics.  There’s also an All-in-One SEO Pack plugin to allow you to define meta tags and much more for your site.  And that’s just the beginning of thousands of plugin options.
4. I made a final post to Blogger, letting people know I was making the switch, to bear with broken links for the moment, and most importantly, to check back soon if another post didn’t appear in their feed reader.  Important Lesson Learned: Wait until this post shows up in your own feed reader before you go any further, otherwise if you have any problems with feed redirection you’ll have to retrace your steps to let your old feed readers know, and that’s not pretty.
5. When I was all ready to go, I logged into my WordPress dashboard in the test directory (mysite.com/wordpress/wp-admin), and in the General Panel changed the WordPress address and Blog Address URL’s to my root directory.  I saved the changes, and got an error, just as I expected, thanks to similar (though slightly reverse) steps at http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory.  I went into my FTP, and after deleting the html files I already had in the root directory, moved the contents of my test wordpress directory into my root directory (make sure you get every one–these are the files that run WordPress).  Then I logged into the dashboard again, through the new URL using only mysite.com/wp-admin/, and chose to upgrade WordPress again (thus fixing files that were messed up in the transition). (If you can avoid changing install directories, it’s easier–I had to deactivate and reactivate a few plugins, and re-publish all my pages, for them to work in the new root directory, after they had worked fine in the test directory.  If you’re already using the root directory you plan to publish WordPress to, the other option is simply to change the settings so that it publishes to the root, but the install files stay in the test directory–making for no moving files via FTP, etc.  It all depends on where you want your WordPress admin files to be.)
6. Before going any further and making changes to Blogger, it’s time to import all your posts and comments into WordPress.  It’s simple and painless if you do it now.  If you wait until you’ve changed your address at Blogger or changed your DNS settings with your host, it’s much more complicated.  An additional precaution against missing importing any comments is to disable comments from anyone but your blog members on Blogger before you make the import into WordPress, just so you don’t have one comment that didn’t import.
7. After you’ve imported your posts, install and activate the “Maintain Blogger Permalinks” plugin, which will change all your Blogger permalinks (which truncate and cut out articles such as the) into WordPress permalinks (you can see it in custom fields at the bottom of your posts afterwards–otherwise, you can delete this plugin and you won’t have to deal with it again, nor will it affect future posts made through WordPress).
8. Then I went to my GoDaddy Domain Manager, and deleted all CNAME and A records for Blogger (might be just ghs.google.com, but could include other IP addresses–if you set it up, hopefully you’ll remember).  Since in my case I had a subdomain for my blog, which I now wanted to redirect to my root folder, I set up a subdomain which forwarded to my root–but that step won’t apply to most of you.
9. Since I had a FeedBurner account, this was the point where I logged in there and set my original feed location as mysite.com/feed (WordPress’ feed addresses are so very simple!).  Then I added my FeedBurner address to the FeedBurner option which was now in my settings, thanks to the FeedSmith plugin.
10. This was also the point I added my Google Analytics code to that option in my Plugins, so I could keep track of my traffic fluctuations throughout the switchover.
11. Here came the final dealings with Blogger.  I went back to my Blogger dashboard, and told it to publish my blog to my new address.  Of course, since I hosted my blog at my own domain (and Blogger instantly told me my domain wasn’t set up correctly any more), this didn’t do me much good other than updating the blog link in my Blogger profile.  But if you were previously publishing to BlogSpot and switched to WordPress, this is the only way your BlogSpot address can redirect to your new WordPress blog, since you don’t own the Blogspot domain and can’t set up a redirect for it.
12. By the exact same token, I set my post feed redirect address in Blogger.  This does nothing but keep your Blog Followers following the feed of your new site.  This is the spot that no one explained well in the tutorials.  If you already owned your own domain and published to it on Blogger, and then switch to WordPress, your domain hosts will not be asking Blogger where to send your feed links–but every single site said Blogger would take care of the feed redirects for me.  Not so.  I had to set that up manually in an .htaccess file (that step coming in a moment).  But again, if you were previously publishing on BlogSpot and switched to WordPress, this is the only way your BlogSpot feed will redirect to your new WordPress feed, so tell Blogger to send all your feed requests on to yoursite.com/feed or your FeedBurner address.
13. Finally, in your Blogger Dashboard, tell Blogger not to let robots index your blog.  You can say goodbye to your Blogger Dashboard–you won’t need to come back to it.  But don’t delete it–if you’ve uploaded pictures to Picasa through your blog, it’s best to leave it right where it is so your picture links don’t decide to disappear from within your WordPress blog someday.  And your Blog Following can still see you as long as you set up your feed redirect in Blogger and leave your Blogger blog right where it is in your dashboard.  But don’t worry–your Blogger blog has entirely disappear from the eyes of anyone but you now (so it doesn’t matter how out of date the template is), and you can only find it through editing the posts in Blogger–all the old permalinks will redirect right to your new blog, in just the next step or two.
14. Here’s where the magic of .htaccess comes into play.  If you’ve never used an .htacess file before, open Notepad or another plain text editor, and save the file as simply “.htaccess”.  Don’t put anything before the dot.  Don’t let it save it as any file type.  Just name it “.htaccess”.  (If for some reason you can’t now, save it as a text file, then rename it to “.htaccess” in your FTP program before you upload it.)  Then check out the section on .htaccess below to find out exactly what to put into your file, save it, and upload it to your root directory (it may overwrite a blank one put there by WordPress).
15. Just for the fun of it, test your redirects.  Enter an old link like http://www.mybloggerblog.com/2009/02/an-old-post.html and see if it shows up with the proper post at http://www.mybloggerblog.com/2009/02/an-old-post/ To test your feed redirects, enter http://www.mybloggerblog.com/feeds/posts/default into your browser and make sure it redirects to your new feed.  If not, you won’t see your post in your feed reader if you were subscribed to your old feed address, and neither will anyone else–so it’s back to the .htaccess drawing board until you get the redirects just right (and sorry, I don’t provide tech support).
16. Make a new “I’m here–can you see me?” post on WordPress.  It should appear in your feed reader, no matter whether you had your old feed address, your FeedBurner address, or your new feed saved there–thanks to the redirects.
17. You’re all set and ready to enjoy using WordPress (or start missing Blogger, as the case may be).

.HTACCESS

There were several things I wanted to do with the .htaccess file redirects.

1. Unlike most sites that talked about moving to WordPress, I wanted to keep my month/year permalinks (and thus I set my permalinks settings in WordPress to the custom setting of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ as directed here) just as I had in Blogger, and have my Blogger permalinks redirect to the same post on WordPress.  So again, I used the great plugin (an install, activate, delete kind of thing) to take care of truncating and eliminating the articles out of the Blogger-originated post permalinks, and then the only thing I had to worry about was trimming off the .html and adding a slash.
   http://blog.ylcf.org/2008/04/my-last-blogger-post.html to http://ylcf.org/2008/04/my-last-blogger-post/
2. I wanted my old label pages from Blogger to redirect to the appropriate tag pages on WordPress (but if you are going to use categories with hierarchies, it’s probably easier to do line-by-line redirects in .htaccess, which is what I ended up doing–see example below).
   http://blog.ylcf.org/search/label/poetry to http://ylcf.org/tag/poetry/
3. I wanted my old archive pages from Blogger to redirect to WordPress archive pages
   http://blog.ylcf.org/2008_07_01_archive.html to http://ylcf.org/2008/07/
4. And most importantly, I wanted to redirect my Blogger feed to my WordPress/Feedburner feed seamlessly–the new posts from WordPress showing up in their feed readers, just like always
   http://blog.ylcf.org/feeds/posts/default to http://ylcf.org/feed or http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ylcf
   (Remember, if you’ve been using BlogSpot, you can’t redirect your feed via .htaccess–you’ll have to put your new feed address in your Blogger feed settings.  If you were using both BlogSpot and FeedBurner, you’re all set–just remember to update your FeedBurner original feed settings and install and set up the FeedSmith plugin in WordPress.)

For the first three, I used Apache mod_rewrites (which I don’t know how to write, so I used what I found here and rewrote what I found here).  For the feed, a simple redirect worked.  (Remember, my subdomain forwarding was already taking care of sending blog.ylcf.org to ylcf.org, so I was only worried about what came after ylcf.org/.)

Here’s what to place in your .htaccess file.  These exact lines, nothing more or less (unless you’re an htaccess pro and already had your own htaccess file), except for changing “yoursite.com” and “yourfeed” to your actual site and feed address, of course:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)\.html$ $1/$2/$3/ [QSA,R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^search/label/[a-z0-9]$ tag/$1/ [QSA,R,L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{1,2})_([0-9]{1,2})_archive.html$ $1/$2/ [QSA,R,L]
</IfModule>
Redirect 301 /feeds/posts/default http://feeds2.feedburner.com/yourfeed
Redirect 301 /feeds/comments/default http://yoursite.com/comments/feed/

The rewrites are in order of the list above.  And no, I don’t understand how it all works–I didn’t particularly care for Algebra.  There are Apache mod_rewrite cheat sheets all over the internet if you feel the need to change something.  But these do work, if you’re sticking with the permalink structure that looks just like Blogger.

If you switched all your Blogger labels to WordPress categories, instead of the tags they automatically import as, you’ll probably want to eliminate that second rewrite rule and redirect your labels to categories line by line (unless you don’t take advantage of category hierarchies–in that case, just change the word tag in that rewrite rule to category, and you’re set).  Here are some examples of label to category redirects:

Redirect 301 /search/label/poetry http://yoursite.com/category/read/poetry/
Redirect 301 /search/label/quotations http://yoursite.com/category/read/quotations/
Redirect 301 /search/label/waiting http://yoursite.com/category/wait/

Hope that helps, folks.  Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming…

Sites I referenced in my learning process:

• http://www.mamablogga.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-migrating-from-blogger-to-wordpress/
• http://www.faithengineer.com/2009/03/making-the-change-from-blogger-to-wordpress-part-2.html
• http://www.devilsworkshop.org/moving-from-blogger-to-wordpress-maintaining-permalinks-traffic-seo/
• http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/
• http://justinsomnia.org/2006/10/maintain-permalinks-moving-from-blogger-to-wordpress/