Transitioning from Blogger to WordPress Tip - Preventing Your Readers from Losing Touch or Getting Lost
by
admin
Back in 2006, I established a ‘junk’ blog. It was supposed to be something that I would use primarily to practice creative writing or just to use to un-block writers block.
I initially kept the site anonymous because I didn’t really care about it, didn’t expect anyone to read or visit it and only wanted to use it for selfish reasons.
Almost 3 years later the site is (by no credit to myself) weirdly popular. I have no idea why. 
If I were to say that I care about the site today, well that could jinx the success it has had, so I will say that ‘I do not care about it at all!’
Running a popular blog from blogger however is a big pain in the but. Comment management on blogger alone, flat out sucks! I can never tell when I receive a comment on blogger, what article the comment is directed at. Which makes it kind of hard to reply to that comment afterwards on a blog with over 1600 articles.
So for that reason and several others, I finally broke down and move it to its own domain and set it up on my long time friend WordPress.
The blogger site is located at http://somethingaboutharry.blogspot.com and the NEW wordpress site is located at http://something-about-harry.com. The look of the new theme of the site is intended to be similar, as I wanted my readers to feel comfortable in the new digs.
That said, I knew there were two areas that I might lose people.
- The Feed
- The front page
I get a lot of subscribers, even though my subscriber count always seems to be woefully incorrect. So I had to go into Feedburner where I manage the feed, and update it to grab the feed from http://somethin-about-harry.com/feed/ instead of the old blogger atom xml location.
Once I had that done, then I could also fix one of the problems with the front page on the old site, but first I should explain a problem with blogger blogs. When you transition from a blogger blog there is no clean way to do a redirect.
You can’t do a 301.
You could do a meta tag auto redirect, and have the page automatically change to the new location, but that makes a lot of visitors/readers uncomfortable. I have too much traffic going to the old site to chance pissing (technical web term for aggravating and upsetting someone terribly) someone off like that.
So instead, I’m using a feedburner trick that I developed a long time ago (and have used here at top10tech on the home page).
I created a buzzboost section of code on feedburner for the new site. I then pasted that code into my old blogger template, just above the content of the blog articles. Now on the blogger site, those blog articles in blogger will never be updated again. all the content is going to the new site. But my readers that land on the homepage that have not learned that yet may not know.
The key to the code is adding this snippet of code after the generic code given by feedburner
<script src=’http: //feeds.feedburner.com/TheresSomethingAboutHarry?format= sigpro&excerptFormat=full&excerptLength=100 @amp;nItems=5‘ type=’text/javascript’/>
So they will now see the full html versions of the posts from the new site displayed on the old site. The links are from a feed, so if anyone clicks on the title or something it will take them to the new site.
Plus, I’m putting to large disclaimers at the top of the site to help get them to the new location.
On top of all that maybe in 3-6 months when traffic dies down at the old site, then maybe I will do a meta tag redirect to the new site, but not till the traffic drops or I find an even better method.
After that, it won’t really matter what happens to the old site so much as long as people don’t get lost and can find their way out of the forest if they do. Maybe I’ll even monetize the old site a bit with some affiliate ads or Fentraphen reviews or maybe just let the thing go dark. Since I didn’t care to begin with and say that ‘I don’t care now’ maybe that will make it so!
