If you can read this, the move went fine. I bet you don’t even notice any difference between the old blog and this one at first, despite a complete shift in platform. A complete shift in paradigm. Revolutionary. I’ve been using Blogger with ftp publishing to my site for this blog. The ftp publishing feature was never really good, but I liked the fact that the files would remain on my server even if Blogger itself ceased to exist, and it didn’t have any dependencies at all on the web server.
Over time though I started hacking my own server-side features that inserted dynamic functionality into the static pages using comments in the html as hooks. Features such as the “related posts”, logging, ads (removed now, I was just interested in seeing how adsense worked in practice), etc. But even if php suddenly shut down, the static html pages would still display fine, just without these features.
Anyway, when Google announced the deprecation of the ftp publishing feature of Blogger, I realized something had to be done in order to keep my blog going. (And I am also getting a bit fed up with Google, so I’m going to try to move away from using so many of their services.) After evaluating the alternatives, I decided to set up a WordPress installation on the server. WordPress’s Blogger import tool worked well, although one post didn’t seem to make it. I don’t know why, nor which. I then created my own theme based on the default. I had to tweak the permalink “slugs” for many of the posts to correspond to the old naming scheme, and did some ModRewrite and php tricks to make sure all old urls are permanently redirected to the corresponding new ones (labels to tags, categories, archives, etc). Which means that all old urls should still work – let me know otherwise.
The old feed urls are also redirected, so this should show up in everyone’s feed readers, although I’m not sure that will work correctly. So let’s see…
