After a little bit over a year with Blogware, I’ve decided to move this blog to Wordpress. I’ve been more than happy with Blogware and I’d still recommend Blogware to anyone who wants a simple hassle-free blog, but over the last couple of months or so I’ve been getting a bit uncomfortable with the fact that this blog was originally given to me so that I could evaluate Blogware’s system and to learn about the blogosphere for work purposes. Little did I know that I’d get hooked on blogging and that Connected Internet would grow to become one of Blogware’s top blogs (I think on some days/months it has been number 1) and a major bandwidth hog.

One of the reasons I like blogging is because I like fiddling with things, and I feel that moving to WordPress will give me more scope to customise my blog. I’ve gone for WordPress rather than Movable Type partly because it is free, but also because I like being part of a community. I also want to have access to better reporting as I’m a closet stato and it can be frustrating not really understanding where my traffic is coming from e.g. today my adsense traffic, which I have to use as a proxy for site traffic, is already up 300% on a normal day (especially strange on a Friday and there are still 12 hours left
to go today), but I won’t know where the extra traffic load is coming from or why until tomorrow morning.

I originally chose Yahoo! for my hosting as they’ve got a great offer on at the moment ($8 per month for 200GB which is very good) but also because they are one of the few recommended WordPress hosting partners that have support available 24×7 in the UK. Things were going ok for a while, but once I discovered they wouldn’t allow .htaccess so that I could make sure external links worked, I switched to Siteground and they’ve been fantastic so far, with responses to emails arriving in under 5 mins. They are also dirt cheap - $4.95 for 800GB. I can’t get over how cheap bandwidth is now.

It’s going to take me some time to get the new blog going. If you want to see how it looks so far then click here to get a preview of the new site! So far I’ve managed to get a ‘holding’ theme in place which I think looks ok until I find one I want to really get my teeth into tweaking.

I’ve also managed to export all of my old Blogware posts and comments to Wordpress thanks to a script (Blogware Input Plugin For WordPress) that Chris Pirillo and Shayne put together. It seems to have worked ok first time, but please let me know if you see any errors (some of the formatting looks out) on the blog. The good thing about the script is that it doesn’t create (I think!) any duplicates, so I’m going to keep running it until this version of my blog finally disappears to ensure that no comments or posts or lost, so feel free to continue leaving comments on either this blog or the new WordPress site.

What I’m working on at the moment is trying to put a redirect in place so that any links to the old posts will automatically point to the same post on the new blog. I think I’m close to finding a solution and if I can work out how to implement this line of code from wp-hackers, I think I’ll have the answer. Once I’ve completed that then I’ll be able to redirect my domain and the old blog will disappear!

Before I get back to trying to setup the new blog I just want to say a big thank you to Blogware for all their help and support over the last year, which has far exceeded that which they would have given a paying customer.

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