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.<\/p>\n
The main difference between using WordPress and using Blogger is that you have to pay for hosting space<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n I strongly recommend a Linux-based account rather than a Windows one. Your host must<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n WordPress requires a little bit more technical involvement<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n WordPress is vastly quicker to publish than Blogger is, because there is no rebuilding<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n There is one problem self-hosted bloggers have to deal with which Blogger users don’t, which is spam<\/strong>. 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).<\/p>\n