Blogging on Blogger always has been a hassle. Here are some of the things I found annoying about writing a post on Blogger:

1. The spacing always got messed up. I had to carefully place <br> tags here and there to keep things consistent.
2. I had to type in HTML. Why? Cause I had codes in my posts and I wanted to highlight them using SyntaxHighlighter. For that I had to create <pre class="brush:cpp;"> tags. You can’t do that in the normal visual panel.
3. The most annoying part is when I switched between Visual and HTML view in the editor. It always messed up my clean HTML.
4. I had to HTML escape my code before pasting it ( < sign would need to be <)

Well, that’s it actually. Writing and editing post on Blogger was a pain.

Now that I wanted to resume blogging again, the Blogger editor was making it hard to get started. It would have been amazing if Blogger had a markdown editor, but it didn’t. Nowadays, I write most of my notes in markdown, which I keep in a git repo: notes.

Then, I also read a recent blog post (TechCrunch: Blogger gets a spring cleaning) on how Google stripped down some of the (already lacking) features from Blogger. Forget about getting a markdown editor, someday the whole platform might disappear.

I had to switch before I continue. And I did. And I am glad that I did.

How did I switch? Well, basically I just followed this tutorial: How To Move Your Blog From Blogger To WordPress

Hosting

The first step was choosing a Hosting. I had a few options in this case:

1. Get a new VPS: I usually just rent a VPS from Linode and directly deploy my projects there. Then again renting a whole server just for a blog seemed slightly overkill to me.
2. Deploy it on my existing VPS: Better than the first option, but I will have to configure my Nginx. I kind of forgot how I configured it last time, so I was a bit reluctant about this option.
3. Get a shared hosting: Now, all the tutorials out there suggest this option. I never actually used a shared hosting before, so this option had the charm of “new experience” with it.

So I went for the third option and bought a shared hosting from Dhrubo Host and deployed my WordPress blog from CPanel. Couldn’t believe how easy it was.

Domain Name

While getting the hosting, I noticed that forthright48.com was available again! Yay!

I previously owned forthright48.com domain but didn’t renew the lease after a year due to procrastination (I can be really lazy sometimes).

A few months after my domain expiration I tried to buy the domain again only to find that some random guy bought the domain and is using it to redirect to fb.com. I was really surprised. Why would anybody in this world apart from me be interested with a domain named forthright48.com? And then use it to redirect towards facebook!

I guess they wanted to resell the domain to me for a higher price. I think I once saw an asking price around 3000$ on GoDaddy. Too bad I was too poor to buy it back.

Migrating Posts

Migrating the posts took the biggest toll on me. Though there was a plugin to make things easier for most people, unfortunately, my blog is filled with latex equations. And they all broke down. Mainly the backslash symbol ('\') disappeared from all posts.

So I had to manually fix every single post. It took me 3 days to fix all posts. I fear that there is still some broken stuff left here and there. If you happen to notice any, please leave a comment.

Was It Worth It?

So I went through so much trouble (3 days of manual labor for fixing posts) to migrate my blog. Was it worth it?

1. Theme: It looks so much better than before. Blogger didn’t have so much option.
2. Markdown: Finally, I have a markdown editor! Now I can just focus on writing and not worry about the HTML.
3. Link Checker: I realized the power of WordPress when I found this plugin. It checks all my posts and detects if there is any broken link. Then, it sends me an email! Amazing plugin indeed. I don’t think I could have gotten such a feature from Blogger.
4. MathJax: I had MathJax on Blogger too, but in order to add MathJax to Blogger I had to manually edit the theme. On WordPress, I just had to install a plugin.
5. More Plugins: There are so many plugins with so many cool features that I kind of feel like I was living under a rock before. What the heck was I doing on Blogger?

Conclusion

I am really enjoying my old blog on the new WP platform. Now that I can write in markdown, hopefully, I will be able to resume writing again.

• Category: Meta