Hesitant, Hopeful

Well, after days and day of exporting, breaking files into smaller parts, converting to .xml format, and trying to import--with varying degrees of success--I finally got everything moved. Let's just say that when you have a pretty big blog (and mine was 6.5MB total) moving from self-hosted WordPress to Blogger is a big ol' pain in the ass. Neither WordPress nor Blogger make it easy to move as, for whatever reason, they seem to be in denial about the reality that anyone would switch from one to another (when, duh, people do it all the time). I mean really, how hard is it to make the import/export files a standard format? Jerks.

And honestly, all that converting and taking days to import to Blogger because there's a limit on the file size that can be imported per day, it wasn't even really the most difficult part of the process. You see, there are hundreds of pictures on my WordPress blog. Apparently I like to share my pictures of... um, everything. But, since the images are hosted on my web-host, in my WordPress installation, there wasn't any good way to move them. Especially since all the pictures were embedded with a path to a folder in my WordPress install. Great. So when I moved everything the pictures still showed up, even though many of them looked weird (spacing, etc.), but they all had to be downloaded from WordPress, uploaded to Blogger/Picasa, and then re-embedded in each of the 500+ posts on this site.

Since this was a hefty job, and since Blogger has a limited amount of space for pictures, my archives are much picture lighter than before. I removed a lot of images and/or replaced them with [IMAGE REMOVED]. But there were still a LOT of pictures I wanted to keep, so I spent two days going through each post and fixing the pictures. There're still more than 250 pictures on this blog, even though I removed a lot of them. Not fun.

The really fun part was looking for a new template and, when I found one, making it look the way I wanted it to. No surprise, this template comes from Designer Blogs. They do really beautiful work. I'm in love with it, for now, though I can't speak to what will happen a month or so down the road expect to say that I will, more likely than not, look for something new. I'm never really comfortable in my virtual skin for long.

After that it was just a matter of changing my social media icons, which I'm not ashamed to admit that I watched a tutorial to figure out because it's different than WordPress, and my links and buttons, etc. I enjoy that part, so it wasn't a big deal. The last pain in the ass was changing my URL so it directed to the right place. It's working fine, for the most part, now. Fingers crossed that the kinks work themselves out sooner, rather than later, because I had to do some fancy footwork with my DNS at name.com to get this thing working.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with the change. Now I just need to download some things from my web-host, make sure that my "Project 7th Sea" site is all moved (that one was much easier since it was like a 200KB in total size), and cancel my hosting. I think being free of that $11 per month fee, which has slowly crept up over the last few years, will make me feel lighter... does that make sense? I don't know, maybe you know what I mean even if it doesn't?

So what do you think? Like my new digs? ^.^