Wordpress to Blogger - Getting Close

I am about 90% to my goal of getting my Blogger blog up to the point that my Wordpress Blog is at.  I did a little google searching this afternoon and finally figured out how to get the Menu working.  I still have to find a way to embed a countdown timer and figure how I want to deal with my list of people that I walk for but I am getting really close and am pretty happy about that.  I was not sure I was going to be able to come up with anything on Blogger that would be close to what I had on Wordpress and am pretty excited about how close I have gotten.

Wordpress to Blogger

I am in the process of converting my blog from Wordpress to Blogger.  I don't use my blog all that often but I have had it for some time so I don't want to just delete it.  I decided earlier this year that I would not be paying for hosting for my Wordpress site after my current hosting contract is up in the fall of 2020 so I have been playing with Blogger as an alternative.  I am actually pleasantly surprised that I have been able to import my content and have found a template that I can live with.  I am still in the process of tweaking the template and site to replicate most of what I have with Wordpress but I am about 90% there now.  Since Blogger is associated with my Google account that makes access to it easy for me and I don't have to pay extra for the hosting.  

Goodbye to Drupal

I started learning Drupal about 8 years ago when I decided to update our Parish website from a Dreamweaver Solution to something that I or others could update without having to have a proprietary program on their computer.  Drupal has a rather steep learning curve but it is rather powerful and has a pretty great community of supporters that help develop it and make it better.  I am saying goodbye to Drupal as I will no longer have time to develop the Parish Website and the people that they are looking to develop a new site for us plan to use Wordpress for the new site.  I can't say that I blame them.  Wordpress has a huge market share and there are many more developers that work with Wordpress and in turn the sites are usually less expensive to develop.  I had switched my blog from Drupal to Wordpress sometime back because I had less time and was looking for something simple to allow me to blog when I felt like it and add a couple of other pages.  Wordpress makes this very easy for us amateurs.  I enjoyed the platform and the community but now it's time for me to move on.

Goodbye to Drupal

I converted my blog from Drupal back to Wordpress several months ago and have not gone back so far.  Wordpress is much easier to deal with from a user perspective.  Media Handling is so much easier than Drupal for something like my basic blog.  I am now working on converting my Church Website and my one other site from Drupal to Wordpress also.  I have found there are several plugins for Wordpress that give me the ability to setup my website similar to how I could with Drupal in the past.  There are different ways to do things in Wordpress but I am going to stay this time.  Drupal keeps getting more complex and is getting beyond the reach of the casual user or hobbyist.

Back to Wordpress Again

My blog has moved back and forth several times between Wordpress and Drupal. Now I am back on Wordpress. I had tried to convert from Wordpress last year because I was kind of upset with Drupal for removing blogapi from core when they went to Drupal 7 and the contrib module did not progress for a long time. I liked the authoring abilities of Wordpress but there were some things like views that I used a little on my blog that I could not easily replicate in Wordpress. After some more research and a new desire to actually use my blog some more I found that there are some free plugins that let me accomplish what I want.

I think this time I am going to stay on Wordpress and look to use it on other smaller sites as well. It is more suited towards a small personal blog like mine. Drupal keeps getting more powerful and I am really not their target market.

Back to Drupal Again

I had converted my blog back to Wordpress a couple of months ago and I liked how it looked and was easy to access using mobile tools.  The problem with it was that I could not do some things that I wanted to do with Wordpress that were trivial when using Drupal.  You take things like CCK and Views for granted when you don't have them.  For instance, I keep a list on my site of the names of people that I walk in support or in memory of when I walk in the Komen 3-Day.  I could not find an easy way to keep that list in Wordpress but it was very simple in Drupal.  Define a custom content type to store the names of the person and how I now them.  Then setup a view to only show the names.  5 mimute effort with Drupal but really not easily done unless you use a commercial Wordpress module.  So back to Drupal it is.  I have pretty much finished up making the changes that I wanted to my blog and I have something that will work for now.

Back to Wordpress

This weekend I converted my blog back from Drupal to Wordpress.  I like Drupal and will continue to use it where it makes sense to.  I just decided that for my personal blog it no longer made sense.  It was more complex than I really needed for my small blog. The other major issue with Drupal from my perspective was that they removed blogapi from core when they went to Drupal 7.  That made it impossible for me to use the external editors that I had been used to using with Drupal 6.  I like being able to update my blog from my phone or Mac and not have to always use a browser.  Maybe now that I am settled with this I can get back to using the blog more than I have been.

Happy Birthday to My Blog

I was looking back at my Blog the other day and realized that I first posted to this Blog 3 years ago today. What started out as a Wordpress blog turned into a Drupal Blog and it keeps changing a little bit all the time. As I learn more about CSS or Photoshop I keep making changes trying to improve my site. I don't use it as often as I intended but I am working on that. I do tend to use it a lot when I am training for the 3 Day but I need to expand on that. I plan to keep using and developing the site for some time to come.

 

Switched Back Again

A month ago I switched my personal blog from Drupal to Wordpress. Not I have switched it back again. I found that I really did want to spend the time to learn how to put together my own theme and not just settle for something that someone else put together. This is still a work in progress but it is better than I had before on Wordpress and I have learned quite a bit about CSS and theming in the last month. Since I am now up to four different Drupal sites that I am working on, I need to learn as much as I can about how it works and what I can do with it. No more Wordpress for me.

Blog Categories: 

Technology

Personal

New Blogging Platform

I made the switch back from Drupal to Wordpress. Drupal is a very powerful CMS but it’s overkill for what I need in a Blog so I switched back to keep this simple. It was pretty simple to switch back and I have a new Wordpress theme that has lots of options. I will be updating this site with the rest of my information in the near future. I want to set this up similar to my other platform so that I can integrate this with both Facebook and Twitter. That will come soon.

New Blog Platform

You might notice the blog page looks kind of plain right now. I decided to get rid of the Wordpress software that I had been using and convert to Drupal. Drupal is the content management system that I have been working with. I have converted my blog entries but have not themed the site yet but it should look better within a week or so.

 

Testing a new tool

I am writing this post from my iPhone using some software just for managing wordpress blogs from iPhone's. So far it is pretty cool. I also updated the blog with a new mac inspired theme that I really like. With this new software maybe I will post more.