From Wordpress to Blogspot, 88 posts later

89 including this one, I guess.

The shift from Wordpress to Blogspot has been pretty painless so far, as long as I exclude the fact that there is no way in hell to import my 1500+ posts from my old site into this one. That is unless I decide to program the export utility myself, something that is not going to happen.

I guess that the deciding factor was Ecto. I had used Ecto for a long time with Wordpress, and I was glad to see that it worked fine with Blogspot. It is much easier to write long posts with it, it feels no different than writing an email message. Another nice thing about Ecto is that it allows you to tamper with the HTML tag formatting, and even allows you to setup custom tags with very minimal fuss.

One thing that gets under my skin is that there is a very weird bug in the way in which Blogspot sets up custom domain names. The proper blogspot address of this blog is http://pedroalbertovera.blogspot.com but I have it setup so it will accept traffic for http://www.pedrovera.com. The problem? It won't do http://pedrovera.com by itself. It says it will do it, but whenever I tried, it gave me an error. The fix? Setup a DNS A record to point http://pedrovera.com to a machine elsewhere. That machine will take that traffic and redirect it to http://www.pedrovera.com.

The reason this is a problem is because all of Google's web hosting services rely on CNAME records instead of A records and it is illegal to setup a CNAME for a base domain.

The final challenge is the old content. I am tempted to leave it as is. After all, I have no intention to let the domain expire, and I have no other use for it. To add insult to injury, the site pays itself so I have no motivation to shut it down until the income drops below to the point when it is not worth keeping Wordpress up-to-date.

A smaller challenge is to rework the templates, which I absolutely hate. I am a terrible web designer, my strength is in programming. I would rather have a site that is 100% plain (my ideal site is Craig's List, all content and literally zero eye candy).