My first challenge here at my new home was to import all my old posts from blogger to WordPress. WordPress can import blogs from many different blog hosting tools: posts, comments, blogrolls, everything. But they have not caught up with the newly revised blogger.com blogs yet. The current distribution of WordPress does not support imports from the new blogger. And my blog had already been upgraded!
The support forums revealed a hack plugin that uses a sites RSS feed to import any feed into WP. This hack is pretty limited since you don’t capture comments and various other types of blog content. But hey, it beats not importing at all so I tried it. Luckily I could not get the plugin to work. I say luckily because it forced me to dig a little deeper into the fora where I found a different style of hack.
The “commercial” or hosted version of WP is found at wordpress.com. That site lets you sign up for a free blog hosted by WP. They support imports from the new blogger. I signed up, imported my old stuff… flawlessly. From there I was able to import my worldpress.com blog here.
Now my challenge is that I have 500+ old posts that I have to sift through, one by one, to determine if I want to keep it, and what category to file it under… Dull work ahead…
Which is actually my oldest home on the web. Imajazz.com was my first domain and I still use my kc@imajazz.com.
For months now I’ve been uncertain about the future of my personal blogging. This move is one step towards re-purposing and reinvigorating this channel.
The immediate motivation for the move is to let me directly tinker with my blogging tool. At blogger.com everything is taken care of for you, and there is less room for customization. Here I run the whole show. I install and administer the WordPress tools that publish this blog. I can configure the site as I want. I can install plugins to extend the basic functionality. Already I’m playing with Flickr integration and sitemaps. I may try out some polls and other goodies. WP also provides some content management capabilities that will allow me to publish other non-bloggy pages that will be integrated into this site’s navigation and share the same design.
But who really cares about KC’s blog? Almost no one. But I have my own reasons for experimenting and building a better home nest.
One big reason for vacating my blogger blog is to exploit WP customizability and array of plugin extension. My very first attempt was to install a blogger import plugin, but that isn’t going so well yet. I have managed to install a cool Flickr plugin that I hope will let me publish my photosets here–when I figure out how all this works!
Does this mean the old blogger blog is dead?
Souns likely to me. Let’s see where this one goes…
…the goal is to import as much of the old blog here as possible. hopefully you’re already seeing it…
When google recently announced their new “My Maps” feature I knew I had to try it out, the only question was, what map do I want to build?
I tried mapping my Flickr snapshots. But Flickr had already done that. Not too interesting.
Then it occured to me that I get a daily Ingleside Police Station Crime Report email that lists all of the police activity for that day that includes the address of the incident. Bingo. So I started mapping crime reports. This is what I came up with. It currently covers the four days from April 2nd through April 5th, listing the arrests and criminal incidents. No, I will not maintain this map. I just used it as a way to learn about this feature. But it does offer an interesting view on the crime in our hood…
