Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress!
New URLs:
http://blog.plaxoed.com (main blog site)
http://blog.plaxoed.com/index.php?feed=rss2 (RSS feed)
Well, I’m finally off Blogger and so far it’s been awesome. In the past few months, the performance of Blogger has been simply terrible; pair that with a lack of features, difficult to customize templates, and a lack of web stats and it was just a bad place to blog.
Now I’m hosted through GoDaddy and it seems to be pretty good. They have a nice admin console that lets me do what I need and the price is right - it’s only $3.99/mo. for a good amount of bandwidth and PHP/MySQL support. Additionally, they are also domain registrars so they have a nice package deal. I looked around at other hosts (lunarpages, 1and1, startlogic) but they were all a bit more expensive or required year long commitments to lock in decent prices. Some of them might have better admin consoles, but I haven’t had to do anything not supported by GoDaddy’s limited console yet.
As part of getting off Blogger completely, I wanted to transfer my old posts and comments. Although there is a provided script and there’s one available for download that imports comments as well, it still took a lot of work to import everything out of Blogger. The main problem is that they seem to be having technical difficulties in publishing remotely. I had to modify my template, post to 99zeros.blogspot.com, save the archive pages manually, copy them over and run the import tool. It was quite annoying, but at least it worked. It would’ve been really bad if I had to manually import each entry 
. When I tried re-publishing my old blog entries directly to my new host for import, I’d sit at this screen forever:
Not sure what it was processing, but it never got past 0% 
Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress team! So far, I’m quite impressed with what you guys have been able to whip up and provide to the community. Plus, it was super easy to find different themes and tons of plug-ins. Any problems or questions I ran into were solved with a quick search on the web. Congrats on building up a great user community.
Lastly, a new blog means a new style. You’ll notice that I’m using correct capitalization and an easy to read black-on-white color scheme now. Hey Scoble and Zawodny, now you can’t say I never did nothin for ya! 
March 27th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
this one has smileys!
March 27th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I’m glad the script worked for you! Too bad about Blogger’s “No! Don’t export! Don’t leave! I’m a Google product! I’m incapable evil!” shenanigans. Others have asked me what to do about the perpetual 0% and I’ve told them to wait but I like your solution. Enjoy WordPress!
March 28th, 2005 at 1:45 am
i don’t think that i agree with your reasons for leaving blogger. but, to each their own.
March 28th, 2005 at 1:49 am
i forgot to mention that feedvalidator.org indicates that your rss feed has problems. i couldn’t add the feed to my bloglines blogroll.
March 28th, 2005 at 3:30 am
I recently moved from Blogger to a hosted WP blog and had no problem at all. It *did* take a while to remotely post the archive file to my new location (I can’t remember how long - maybe 15 minutes?), but they came over just fine, although I abandoned my comments.
As for why to leave Blogger, my *personal* take is that Blogger’s really great for folks who are starting out with blogging, or just want to try it before they make the jump, but between the lack of accepting or generating trackback pings and the lack of categories Blogger just didn’t do it for me. Those things could be easily added to blogger, while some of the other features of a fully featured blogging package sort of require a hosted system (stats and some of the more in depth configuration features). I didn’t find the templates in Blogger any harder to customize, though….
Anyway, welcome to WordPress.
cori
March 28th, 2005 at 6:22 am
I like word press and actually it’s really starting to become a tool now that Structuredblogging.org has a plug-in for this, however check out CuteNews. You can see a working version at JoeBurlas.com and the only thing I like better about it is that it does NOT use an SQL Database. It’s all on text files and it’s a simple app. I do heavily suggest it. Easy to move, fun to play with and very customizable because the template is the text and you can fit the text into any website framework. Enjoy. Joe.
March 28th, 2005 at 7:59 am
ddouglas - Feed Validator says my feed is valid (http://blog.plaxoed.com/index.php?feed=rss2) and I was able to add both my RSS2 and my Atom feed to my Bloglines blogroll. I was having some trouble with it earlier, let me know what error messages it gives you (if any).
Thanks!
March 28th, 2005 at 9:35 am
Your feed works fine on Onfolio.
March 28th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
oooh, you edited your blog since I last commented…
why do you feel the need to give in to peer pressue? you’re not 16 anymore. so who cares if you dont capitalize…it’s not like the HAVE to read your blog. now I feel like I’m readnig a book.
btw, it’s painfully slow to log in to here as well. maybe even slower than blogger on a good day.
March 28th, 2005 at 1:35 pm
i believe that blogging exposes personal short comings. keep on blogging markus.
March 28th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
I would recommend getting “feed reader” (www.feedreader.com) as it will read your RSS/Atom posts whether their are errors are not (which is good for me).
March 28th, 2005 at 8:42 pm
welcome to the wordpress community bro… looks sweet… i also ditched blogger for ol’ WP…
March 30th, 2005 at 2:09 am
markjen — as you already know, your feed is now validating at feedvalidator.org without any problems. i don’t recall what the previous problems were. anyway, it appears that whatever trouble you were previously experiencing with the feed has been resolved.
March 31st, 2005 at 5:30 am
Wordpress stuns supporters with unexpected fund raising practices
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050331-4759.html?67081
News that Wordpress — a popular blogging software — has been using hidden advertising on their website to generate funding has left some enthusiasts bewildered and others betrayed. The initial discussion of the links hidden on the Wordpress website took place in a Wordpress support forum. Wordpress’ lead developer, Matthew Mullenweg, locked and commented in that thread offering an explanation:
April 4th, 2005 at 9:09 pm
[…] o got fired from Google for blogging? He’s back, working at Plaxo, and on WordPress. Here’s the story of his switch. He has a style switcher that turns capital letters off and on. « Yaho […]
April 5th, 2005 at 11:13 am
[…] Mark Jen who got fired from Google for blogging is back, is now using Word Press! And this is the story why he switched to Word Press
No comments have been a […]
April 7th, 2005 at 9:41 am
I’ve been hearing reports of Magpie failing pretty consistently on sites hosted by godaddy.
How is the WP dashboard working for you?
April 10th, 2005 at 5:32 pm
[…] ost less than ten comments from the entire blog. It turns out that I’m not the only one who ran into the blogspot problem. Andy Skelton has since created a specialized template for those having this […]
September 7th, 2005 at 9:23 am
quite enjoyed your work .
September 8th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
You have a good site, i enjoyed my stay!
September 9th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Hallo thank you for a lovely web site I enjoyed
October 27th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
How did you get your RSS feed to work with Godaddy? I am trying to set one up on www.dburetort.com and I keep getting 404 errors.
Thanks!
February 1st, 2006 at 9:26 am
Hi, I like your site! I enjoyed browsing it. Thanks. In Dutch we say dank-je-wel 4 thanks))
March 12th, 2008 at 3:11 am
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