Switch to WordPress – which one?

  • meandmyhouse · Member ·

    I’m impressed! I just found WordPress and like what I’m seeing and hearing. I have blogs from blogger, but hosted at my own website – it is mainly articles that go with my website and I wanted them there. And I use viJournal as my desktop journal and it is able to send and post directly to my blog. So Blogger seemed great at first.

    But they promoted the big add of categories, then when we updated to new blogger, they told us that was only for hosting at their site – we’d have to move our blog there. And I’ve never been able to figure out rss/atom feed, and can’t get any help from blogger on that. IOW, Blogger has been pretty smooth for me, but not doing all I’d like. And the community here seems to be more friendly and helpful.

    So, thought WordPress looks like a great switch to make, but I’ve got questions first.
    With WordPress.com I’d get all the helpful – you-take-care-of-things – benefits, but I’d have to host at wordpress.com – right? AND to switch, I’d have to first move my present blogs (I have 3) to blogger/blogspot.com (off my own website)? Is ther any reason I’d *want* my blogs hosted at your site, not mine? I don’t see it, since I have my site already and these are articles to go with certain sections.

    OR, I can use WordPress.org – my host already has it available for our sites – but then I’d be flying alone – might mess things up royally, since I know nothing about MySQL or PHP? If I go with WP.org is there a way that all my previous blogs will transfer to the new WP template from the Blogger stuff? Is it hard?

    I’ve played around with the demo of WP and it seems easy enough. I’d want to make some changes – like add our logo and stuff to the header, my own colors and fonts, etc.to blend better in with the rest of my site. But certainly not program the whole thing myself. (I know HTML, not much css, just a bit from working with Dreamweaver, which I have.)

    Sorry this is so long, I just need some help/answers in order to make a decision on switching to WP, and if so .com or .org.

    Also I couldn’t get the templates to show up – they were all black. I’m on Mac, Firefox.

    Thanks for help.
    MeandMyHouse

  • drmike · Member ·

    I’m going to point you at the please read me first sticky as a start. I’m kind of behind on tickets today so someone else is going to have to hit the questions here.

    Short quick answer is how technically minded are you? If tech is fine, I’d go for the download at wp.org. If you just want to blog, I’d stay here at wp.com.

    Hope this gives you a start,
    -drmike

  • meandmyhouse · Member ·

    thanks.

  • wank · Member ·

    If you know HTML and are used to being able to customise your own templates, you’re likely to get frustrated with wordpress.com fairly quickly. (We can’t upload or edit our own themes, and have to pay an extra $15 if we want to edit the CSS.) So, seeing as you already have hosting set up and people presumably have that site bookmarked, I’d say go with wordpress.org and keep it on your own domain.

    I don’t have any experience of importing from the new blogger, so you would probably have to ask over at .org about that. Worst case scenario, you could export the posts to your .com blog and them import them into your .org blog.

  • drmike · Member ·

    The importer for blogger is currently broken. Something on blogger’s end. It’s being looked into. That would be occuring on all of the wordpress playforms.

  • cremenih · Member ·

    i was able to import everything from blogger yesterday just fine. it didn’t work the day before that when i tried.

  • drmike · Member ·

    Hmm, actually it did for me this morning as well.

    I do hope that the new code filters down asap to the regular wp and wpmu codebases. :)

    Thnaks for the catch. :)

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