My partner and I often discuss what we should be doing to make sure that you know that we can help you move your blog. Our “preferred” or emphasized term from day one has been “migrate” or “migration”. Is that really the term you will be looking for when you decide to pull the plug on blogspot (or per our discussion yesterday is it blogger we should be keying on here?), hubspot, etc., etc. and move your blog to WordPress? What if you are looking to simply move your existing WP blog to another host?

I tend to use the term “move” but I’m not sure it that is right either.

Today I decided to look for synonyms of “migrate” to see if I was missing something.

“Migrate Synonyms: drift, emigrate, immigrate, journey, leave, nomadize, range, roam, rove, shift, transmigrate, trek, voyage, wander” says http://thesaurus.com/browse/migrate.

Most of those terms don’t seem all that right with the exception of perhaps “leave”. Please leave a comment and let me know what terms might be better to have people find us and know that we can help them with their transition between blog platforms, or from blog host to blog host.

I also looked under “move“.

“Move Synonyms: actuate, advance, blow, budge, bustle, carry, change, climb, crawl, cross, depart, dislocate, disturb, drift, drive, exit, flow, fly, get away, get going, get off, glide, go, go away, head for, hurry, impel, jump, leap, leave, locomote, march, migrate, off-load, position, proceed, progress, propel, pull out, push, quit, relocate, remove, roll, run, scram, shift, ship, shove, skip out, split, stir, switch, take off, transfer, transport, transpose, travel, traverse, walk, withdraw”

Again a couple seem interesting like “change”, “relocate”, and “switch”. Whatever we call it if we can help you, then give us a hollar and if you see a term we should be using to help people find our services, please let us know with a comment.

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You can easily setup a custom domain name on Blogspot or Blogger.

By default all blogs are hosted at blogname.blogspot.com. This is the default standard.  You can actually select a different available sub-domain name, if you like. Here is how.

Choosing an available sub-domain

1. Click on the Settings Tab
2. Click on the Publishing Tab
3. You will see “Publish on blogspot.com.
4. Type in the sub-domain of your choosing next to “Blog*Spot Address”.

change the sub-domain name or select "custom name"

For many people however it may be preferable to buy a domain name and use that to access the blogger or blogspot content. This has numerous advantages including:

• It no longer looks like you are using a free service
• It is much easier to remember and type-in a simple domain name
• Later when you migrate to WordPress or another platform it is much easier to redirect traffic and maintain your search engine optimization — or Google juice as many call it these days

Create a Custom Domain Name on Blogger and Blogspot

If you choose to buy a domain, you may either use a service like GoDaddy (my preference) or purchase it directly through Blogger where it is amazingly just $10.

Domains are registered through a Google partner and cost $10 (USD) for one year. As part of registration, you will also get a Google Apps account for your new domain. (Aside: My only concern is that I don’t know their terms of service. It may be fine — but I have not checked it out.)

Once you have your domain name purchased and the name server set;

1. Click on the Settings Tab
2. Click on the Publishing Tab
3. You will see “Switch to: • Custom Domain (Point your own registered domain name to your blog)” (see image below)
4. Click on that link
5. Remember to type in www. before your domain name as you are required to use it. You could also use a different subdomain, but this is less likely.  If you don’t enter the www. you will receive this warning: “Blogs may not be hosted at naked domains. Blog host names must have a subdomain. For example, try: www.YourDomainName.com”.

You will see this screen:

Create a custom domain -- you must use a sub-domain

Be sure however to also check the box to redirect YourDomainName.com to www.YourDomainName.com. If you don’t you will get an error page or worse yet with godaddy.com you may get their advertising/holding pages.

If you follow these simple steps, you will be using a custom domain name in no time for your blogger or blogspot blog and no longer using a sub-domain at blogspot.com or blogger.com.

Happy domain custom creating.

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1. Stuck in Blogger? Move to WordPress the Easy Way

A recent client had her blog, thefatandskinnyonfashion.com, well developed in Blogger, including thousands of categories and tags. She was even using a custom domain name (see how you can setup a custom domain name for your blogspot or blogger blog). She asked us to move her very active blog from Blogger to WordPress for a number of reasons including improved SEO and ease of posting and we are glad that she called on BlogWranglers.com to migrate to WordPress.

Before; the blog on blogger.

After; the blog after we moved to WordPress from blogger.

Moving the Text is Easy. Images, not so much.

As you can see in the Move Counter statistics in the top right of our website, we move a lot of blog posts and comments in a year so we knew we could help her. Of course moving the content itself is the “easy” part. Blogger or Blogspot offer a blog export of your content which, when working — which was fifty percent of the time during this move — allows a very easy move of the content to WordPress.

Unfortunately, there are several hard parts that the export tools don’t handle well.   This has forced us to develop some pretty slick routines for moving the hard parts of a blogger blog to WordPress including specifically the images. The images you upload in Blogger posts are stored in a Picasa Web Album.

When you upload an image through Blogger, it gets stored on Picasa Web Albums, and is therefore subject to the quota limit on your account there. You can log in there with your Google Account to access all your images. Source Link

Go ahead and open that album using your Google Account. You will see that the images have names that are impossible like:
[not a real link] http://lh3.ggpht.com/_a9N_t1kDwYo/TD_PQAdbT4I/AAAAAAAAC7Y/i2iPIxuBqyA/s512/IMG_0849-1.jpg

However in your blog, an image will be linked thus:

[not a real link] http://sitename.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/_a9N_t1kDwYo/S2XR_3ZF4dI/AAAAAAAACQw/pP2EYjg_61Q/s400/descriptive-name-of-image.jpg

Of course this is even more complicated because some images are in sequentially numbered sub-domains. For example on 2.bp.blogspot.com and 3. and 4. and so forth.

Matching Image Names to Posts

So while you can make a complete back-up of your Picasa Album, how do you match these image names to the right post and make the images work in your blog? That is precisely the process we have perfected over our last several moves and why our services can be helpful to you.

We make a copy of your images using the name referred to in the blog posts instead of the cryptic numbering scheme found by default in your Picasa Web Album. We can than correct the links in your new WordPress blog to point to your now local copy of each image.  Having a local copy of your images is important because Picasa can be pulled out from under you with no warning.  Also retrieving images from remote sources is generally slower and linking to your photos from a third party site like Picasa is an example.

Also, all images in Picasa Web Albums are stored in two sizes, the display size S400 is most common, but you may also see S72-c, S200, S320, S640, etc. The s72 being a thumbnail image. The others are at the dimension that Blogger will display them in your post. If you then have a full sized image that you link to it will be an S1600, but the link will be to S1600-h (h meaning HTML) because it is wrapped in an HTML page. Our process grabs both sizes and duplicates them in your WordPress install and links to them from your posts and pages correctly.

Aside: Even if you are staying on blogger, we can generate lists of what images go with what posts and pages.  This would be very helpful to you in the case of catastrophic loss on your blog.  With the list we generate you could actually rebuild your entire site from a backup.

The Rest of the Blogger to WordPress Move

What other services did we provide on this move? Several.

• We moved all posts and comments
• We created the several users who had made posts and kept their posts attributed to them
• We moved the images (display size and full size) and adjusted the links to continue them on the new site
• We re-created a near identical theme in WordPress to match the original theme design
• We adjusted the Google Friend Connect to get her friends to the new site
• We made sure that she knew how to adjust her Feedburner feed to keep her friends subscribed to the new posts

With every Blogger migration that we complete we further refine and improve the migration process.  We are to the point where it is pretty smooth and straight forward and I think our client will tell you it was fairly painless.

Can we help you with your Blogger move to WordPress content publishing platform? Give us a hollar using the Contact page if you think we can help you.

Want to see the before and after? The photos above are the proof of a smooth move.  We made only a few select changes and the average reader will not notice that the entire blog was moved.

Related posts:

1. Blogger Photo Back-Up Service
2. Quickly Setup a Custom Domain on Blogger Blogspot

I really like Google Wave — I find it a great way to carry on a threaded conversation, especially an punchlist as I finish out a project. But sadly Google announced last week that they are tossing in the towel and pulling the wave plug! Ironically it is announced on the Google Blog, but not present or visible on the main Google Wave about pages …. Ironically I was informed by someone on Facebook, in my mind one of the poorest communications tools known to man (and women). Great for connecting, poor for communicating.

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Migrations from Blogger to WordPress are becoming more popular.  In our client discussions we hear of the following advantages;

Overview of Blogger Migration Advantages

• All database data and images stored on your own server
• Improved page load speed
• SEO enhancements available
• Increased ease of posting in the WP environment as compared to Blogger

Control Your Content

We have heard a few stories about Google simply wiping out Google a account, often with no notice.  In a recent case, Google declined to reinstate the account.  Unlike WordPress where regular back-ups are simple to make and can even be automated, when you blog with Blogger all of your data is in the hands of Google.  They can do what they choose, including close your account without notice.  We realize this is not common it does raise a legitimate concern.  We prefer self-hosted accounts when available.

Our focus here at BlogWranglers is moving blogs.  However, in working with Blogger recently we discovered that backing up your images in a way that makes them useful in the case of a disaster is not easy.

For those who may not want to migrate, but do want to backup their photos, we can help.

Blogger Image Back-Up Only

While moving a few Blogger Blogs to WordPress we developed several excellent techniques for moving images. Unlike the Blogger Content Back-Up that is now available, images are not readily available in a usable format. Blogger images are stored in three formats;

• Thumbnail Size Blogger Images
• S400 – the displayed size of your images in the blog post images in Blogger
• S1600 / S1600-h – the full sized original image that you uploaded

We can provide you with a list of all images and with a list of the posts that use those images as well as a directory of each of these images.

How Blogger Images are Stored

Many people are unaware that every time you upload an image in Blogger when creating a post that it goes into a Picasa web album. The album is “hidden” from public view unless you alter that.

Of course you can easily make a back up of that entire album, but the image file names are cryptic and nothing ties them back to specific posts. Many use winHTTrack and make a duplicate of the site off-line. However with this method, the images are buried in several levels of sub-directories and they have cryptic directory names.

When we first started doing Blogger site moves, the Blogger/Picasa images were moved with simple brute force. We would have to essentially go post by post, and retrieve and upload the proper pictures while creating links when migrating. Thankfully we have developed a more automated system.

Backup Blogger Photographic and other Images

Our system retrieves and archives your images economically and in a way that would allow you to match images to the proper posts should you ever be in a disaster recovery situatation. It also allows us to easily re-create the images during a complete move to WordPress.

So while you are encouraged to make the complete move to  WordPress from Blogger, feel free to use our contact form to give us a hollar if you just want to make a back-up of your Blogger images. We’d be happy to provide you with a quote for this service.

Related posts:

1. Stuck in Blogger? Move to WordPress the Easy Way
2. Quickly Setup a Custom Domain on Blogger Blogspot

Some of the newer themes being developed are really nice and flexible. I came across a few lately that I really liked. When I get a minute perhaps I’ll feature a few others that I have liked.

This past week when doing a Blogger to WordPress move (the migration included moving about seven hundred images to the BlueHost WordPress server from Picasa/Blogger), I found one that I really liked called Simple Balance.

What is nice about this particular theme is that you can put several different looks on it, change a lot of the features such as show one featured post with the rest excerpted, etc. The site advertises version 2.1, but in fact the download I took was version 2.2. While I appreciate a theme like Thesis with all of the hooks and flexibility, using something like this is much more intuitive and offers a lot of simple flexibility.

Installed Theme

Access the Simple Balance Control Panel

Options are a click away in Simple Balance

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Migrating from HubSpot to WordPress continues amongst a variety of businesses. One of the companies we spoke with recently operates in three countries which means it is a sizable enterprise. Their reasons for moving from HubSpot to WordPress are;

1. The API does not meet expectations
2. The website is loading slowly (very slowly)
3. Lacks the ability to include custom developed software
4. There is no direct access to the database, which limits access to our own content
5. Not seeing an SEO benefit

A consulting firm shared their primary motivation behind the move from HubSpot to WordPress.

1. $250  a month is no longer affordable
2. The purpose of driving conversions was not achieved
3. The blog posting/editing system is a pain to use

We are not certain if there is a trend developing here.  WordPress is certainly gaining steam and it is quite natural for companies like HubSpot to see customers come and go.   Client companies may shrink or mature or take on internal expertise or hire topical experts.

Do you think there is a trend in HubSpot clients moving from HubSpot to WordPress?

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1. Personal Blog Experience Drives Blog Migration to WordPress

For the first time ever BlogWranglers was asked if we could move a blog from HubSpot to WordPress.  All we needed to hear was move and WordPress and we were all in.  Another blog migration here we come.

Well, what a surprise upon logging into the account at HubSpot.  Here is what we found;

1. There is no blog or website Export function in HubSpot
2. There is no access to the database in HubSpot

The account is structured in way that really prevents leaving HubSpot.  So far, all of the major content managements systems that we have worked with offer some sort of export or migration tool or access to the database and file system, so HubSpot was quite a disappointment on this point.

We ended up doing a lot of heavy lifting, the hard way, and successfully transferred the website content into a fresh WordPress installation on our dedicated server.

The client is very happy now and grateful to have reduced his monthly expenses considerably.

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http://wpgarage.com/tips/38-ways-to-optimize-and-speed-up-your-wordpress-blog/ .

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

http://www.port80software.com/tools/compresscheck.asp

No related posts.

I can’t quite remember how to generate the theme directory with PHP – I’m usually off by a letter for some reason …

It’s of course very simple and I do it regularly when creating updates and custom coding, particularly in Thesis custom themes, because adding code in open hooks will NOT link to the the directory, but rather to the main directory structure unless you add this:

<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>

I hope you find this in Google more easily than I  did because searching for the keyword — Theme — always seems to display results of WordPress theme sites and not to the URL structure to get to a theme directory.

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