Switching from Blogger to Wordpress

Yesterday I sat down and tried to start making my blog look a little snazzier.  The default templates in blogger were fine, but I wanted more flexibility.  I was delighted to find templates, backgrounds, clip art, fonts, and more — all available for free on the net.  So, I found a few templates I liked and decided to try them out.  I read several informative articles, so I felt well prepared for the task ahead.

But a curious thing happened.  The menus on Blogger looked nothing like the ones I read about.  I tried cutting and pasting templates in, but they wouldn’t work.  Strange.  For the next two hours, I searched the web in pursuit of an answer.  I never found it — but, I had developed a hunch about this conundrum.  When I clicked on “Customize Design”, blogger spit out, “Blogger Layouts customization is not supported for blogs hosted on non-Blog*Spot servers.”  This was fine and dandy…but I didn’t want to customize a Blogger layout; I wanted to import another template from the web.  Still…I wondered if this was related to my problem.  So, I created a test blog that was not hosted on my server.  Sure enough, the menus that the guides spoke of were there.

So….This left me with a sticky situation.  If I wanted to host my own blog, I could not customize its design.  I finally decided that I was neither willing to forgo customizations, nor was I willing to host my blog on Blogger.  It was time for a change.

Luckily, there is a great alternative!  WordPress.  And here it is!  There were a few hiccups, but pretty soon, my blog was back!  :-)  I’m happy to say that WordPress allowed me to import all my previous blog posts and comments.  I was even able to customize the links that WordPress uses, so all links to my blog should still work!  This is my first attempt at customizing a blog, and credit is certainly due to those who designed the template I started with.  I hope you like it…we’ll see what I can do in the future.

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