In trying to return to blogging I realised that the tools have moved on but my own blogging software had not – it was time to move away from another side project that would not be much missed. The blog portion of XSM (my CMS) did a good job of meeting the standards back in the day so I at least had an RSS feed from the archive. The aim was to move to an inexpensive (or free) hosted blogging platform that would have some easy to blog features such as an app or email-in-articles feature.

Having previously tried WordPress I decided to give Blogger a chance. The user interface is smooth and easy to understand but with plenty of options. The themes provided are comprehensive and I soon found one I liked. Importing was supposed to be easy – just upload the XML file you have exported and it would work… but no such luck – the importer just hung. It seems that Blogger is very particular about the XML formats it will work with and there is no documentation or feedback. It would, however, import from WordPress so, as there are many more plugins for RSS in WordPress I decided to try that. Unfortunately the WordPress.com hosted system did not provide this plugin so I spun up my own install to run the import. the RSS Multi Plugin for WordPress was able to load my blog but only 100 articles – not a problem as I only had 103. From there I exported the blog and ran it through the WordPress to Blogger site which worked smoothly. Blogger was then able to import the file. Yay.

I was almost done for the night but before I fell asleep I decided to download the Blogger app for iOS and write a quick post. Again the user interface was easy to understand, though rather limited. I wrote my post and saved it as a draft. CRASH. App gone. Not good. I loaded the app back up and my article was gone. I tried a shorter one and the same thing happened. Bad Google. Patience gone I decided to sleep on it.

In the morning I decided it was terminal and I should try WordPress instead. Amusingly I had deleted the instance I ran for the conversion process but WordPress.com was perfectly able to import my Blogger site and I was up and running again. I opened the WordPress app on my iPhone (having previously thought it was a little weak) and noticed it was actually pretty decent compared to the blogger app *and* it didn’t crash!

So now I am up and running on WordPress, it seems crazy I got here via my own WordPress install and Blogger but I’m confident now that I have made the right choice. With such great tools at my finger tips how can I fail to keep the blog up to date? Right?

Wish me luck, I’ll see you here again soon.