My blog over at woodgen.com has been running a fairly long time as blog lifetimes go – since May 2007 to be precise. Along the way, I have had the usual frustrations experienced by anyone running their own sites – outages, lost data recalcitrant scripts and the like. Inevitably, as I added more functionality (ie complexity), things started to go downhill. The camel’s back broke under the straw of updating WordPress to its present incarnation of version 2.7. At this point all my archived posts became inaccessible even though the mysql database appeared undamaged and intact.

Various attempts to resurrect the archives failed and I became so frustrated, I set up a new blog at Blogspot (running on the Blogger software). This worked fine except that I had to import all my old posts from the mysql database by hand which took three days! That I am still sane after this is a testament to my genes or more likely, Nurofen.

So, with one fully functional blog which is here, I felt moderately happy, except that all my comments had disappeared and as I started to look at various statistics, I realised that whereas my old blog was well spidered by Google etc. and came up as a first hit on many searches, my new one figured nowhere and reading various folks views on SEO stuff, I came the view that a blog at Blogspot was always likely to feature less prominently than one on a personal web site – other things being equal.

Anyone that publishes a blog is presumably concerned with getting read by someone and I am no exception – my deathless prose is not for me alone, so I started to look for ways of resurrecting my blog at woodgen.com. I won’t bore you with all the details, blind alleys, deathtraps, pitfalls and the like – tell me if you need more info but this is what worked in the end.

1. I set up a (free) blog at wordpress.com which is here.
2. I imported my Blogger data (all the posts) to my new wordpress.com blog, using the Tools>Import option
3. I exported my data from wordpress.com using the Tools>Export option
4. I set up a new database and WordPress site on my own hosted server
5. I imported the xml file generated in (3) above.
6. Hey Presto – I have a working blog.

Finally – because I was being driven crazy by double apostrophes appearing in my new blog – as used to happen in the old WordPress blog – when I wanted only one. I searched and searched until I found the solution.

7. I created a file called php.ini containing just these lines

magic_quotes_runtime=off
magic_quotes_gpc=off
magic_quotes_sybase=off

8. I copied the file to every directory of my new woodgen blog ( probably only one directory is important but by this stage I was past caring.
9. I commented out these lines in wp_settings.php (my // is already shown here)

// If already slashed, strip.
//if ( get_magic_quotes_gpc() ) {
//    $_GET    = stripslashes_deep($_GET   );
//    $_POST   = stripslashes_deep($_POST  );
//    $_COOKIE = stripslashes_deep($_COOKIE);
//}

// Escape with wpdb.
//$_GET    = add_magic_quotes($_GET   );
//$_POST   = add_magic_quotes($_POST  );
//$_COOKIE = add_magic_quotes($_COOKIE);
//$_SERVER = add_magic_quotes($_SERVER);

And now, finally, I can write let’s go to Jim’s place without appearing illiterate!

For the time being, I am going to be cross posting my stuff at the three sites that I now have with my blog – so determined am I not to have to go through the whole darn thing again.

Bottom line after this experience?

Blogger at Blogspot is by far the easiest blog to set up and use. It lacks some of WordPress’s bells and whistles and has fewer attractive themes to pick from although Wordpess themes are being converted for Blogger by enthusiasts. It is better integrated with other Google services than WordPress which will be of interest to folk running ads etc although the SEO stuff actually seems to favour WordPress on your own site.

As far as I am concerned, if only a few people read my stuff and find some value or amusement in it, I am well satisfied.

I chose WordPress for this blog having seen how flexible it appeared and also the wealth of themes and plugins around the net. Setting it up has mostly been a trouble-free experience, including making a few posts and adding a variety of plugins to do stuff like displaying photos. However, a couple of glitches have occurred, like the sudden disappearance of the Visual Editor (at least in FF. It was OK in IE on Parallels – I use a Mac). Google had a boatload of hits referring to the same problem which no-one seems to have cracked conclusively yet although some folk have had success with a variety of different approaches, none of which worked for me.

I have worked around it by installing yet another plugin – another rich text editor that replaces the tiny_mce editor used in WordPress 2.1.3. I found it here

Another Goldwing owner uses WordPress for his Goldwing Blog and it looks very smart so I thought I would give it a try. Installation could hardly be simpler, I wonder how usage will be and what it takes to develop a nice theme of my own? Basically, I like simple elegant themes – I hate flashing stuff and cluttered pages which are seen an awful lot on motorcycle pages for some reason.