Moving to WordPress
I’ve had a request from a fellow Muslim blogger for information about what is required in transferring from Blogger to WordPress. My main blog hasn’t been based on Blogger for more than a year, and I understand that the system has been overhauled. I’ve been using WordPress since early this year and I intend to stick with it, but I appreciate that it may not be for everybody.
The main difference between using WordPress and using Blogger is that you have to pay for hosting space, or else find someone with spare space. My recommendation is that you look for deals with high (or no) traffic limits, particularly if you intend to use a lot of graphics (bear in mind, themes often use graphics). The total amount of data transferred on my blog yesterday was just over 60Mb; over a 30-day month that would add up to 1,805.1Mb, or 1.76Gb (a gigabyte is 1,024Mb). So don’t even look at deals with one-gigabyte traffic limits – your blog will be off the air for about a third of each month.
I strongly recommend a Linux-based account rather than a Windows one. Your host must offer PHP and MySQL. Your blog entries will be stored in the database, along with everything else about your blog except for images and themes (and WordPress itself); I have read that, compared to Movable Type, WordPress’s database and storage requirements are very low. Beware: before sharing someone else’s space, check if their contract allows them to host your blog! Mine doesn’t allow me to give away space, and if you break your contract, you may find your blog suddenly pulled down.
WordPress requires a little bit more technical involvement to set up than a Blogger blog does. You will need to unpack the tgz or zip archive yourself, transfer it to your hosting account and edit a few lines of the configuration file. The same goes for WordPress themes and plugins. I may be able to offer some help in getting themes and plugins to work.
WordPress is vastly quicker to publish than Blogger is, because there is no rebuilding. Instead, the blog is built dynamically each time someone looks at it. Rebuilding times become ever longer as your blog grows; this doesn’t happen with WordPress.
There is one problem self-hosted bloggers have to deal with which Blogger users don’t, which is spam. Spam is normally concerned with indecent material, dodgy medications and gambling. WordPress excels in combating this sort of material; it offers a two-level word-blocking system, which means that posts containing some words can be screened for moderation, and some can be auto-eliminated; the WordPress online documentation offers a list of common spam words. You can also make it necessary for commenters to register first, and automatically moderate first-time commenters. Unlike Movable Type, you can screen trackbacks as well as comments (the lack of flexibility on MT’s trackback has led to many MT bloggers shutting trackback down).
WordPress, unlike Blogger (but like almost every other blogging system) also offers categories, and its theme system allows the user to emphasise the “page” content at the expense of the “blog” content; see George Monbiot’s page as an example of a website (as opposed to a blog) which uses WordPress. It also allows trackback and pingback, both methods of displaying links to an individual post in someone else’s comment box. (Pingback is exclusive to WordPress/b2; Haloscan and MT also offer trackback.)
Finally, there is the matter of documentation. There is virtually no printed documentation on WordPress. There are actually not that many books on blogging anyway; many are a couple of years old (and therefore predate WordPress and cover other antiquated blogging tools) and I’ve seen one which assumes that “blogging” is the same as “using Blogger”. Although the WordPress system (and the b2 system on which it is based) has been around for a couple of years, its popularity has increased drastically this year, largely due to the overwhelming spam problem on MT. APress has a book scheduled for publication this November entitled Building Online Communities with Drupal, PhpBB, & WordPress. In the meanwhile, WordPress offers a support forum and an online codex, which is a community-supported online book. How this compares to Blogger’s help system, I can’t really say, as I have never used it.
Until this year, a fair number of those now using WordPress were using MT, and it would be worthwhile to look at the differences. MT is a commercial package, although for personal use (with one author only) you can use it for free, as long as you mention MT on your website. WordPress is “free software”, that is, software you can freely redistribute. MT allows you to set up numerous blogs with one installation of MT as long as you purchase a licence; with WordPress you can host multiple blogs with one database, but you need to make multiple copies of the WordPress software. While MT’s community have developed plug-ins to combat spam, WordPress’ are built in, and MT shows no real signs of catching up with WordPress in this aspect. I’m not sure to whom I can recommend MT now; there is a body of expertise around building MT blogs which has not yet developed for WordPress, but again the WordPress community can be expected to close this gap fairly soon.
