Blogger

Bye, bye Blogger. Howdy WordPress

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Finally moved my blog to WordPress from Blogger. I also moved it to a different URL as well. Move was as smooth as it could get. I wasn’t sure whether I should make the move. I didn’t want any Google juice to be lost or give my readers 404s. In my old setup I was using Feedburner to serve my feeds and Blogger to serve my blog. Now WordPress serves the blog and Feedburner still serves the feeds. Here you have the steps.

  1. Install WordPress (I used 2.6.3)
  2. Import the blog posts and comments from Blogger. Go to Manage -> Import in WordPress and follow the instructions there.
  3. Set the authors properly.
  4. Download and install the WordPress plugin wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks-1.0.zip. (Do not forget to enable the plugin as well)
  5. Under Manage > Maintain Blogger Permalinks click the button that says Maintain Blogger Permalinks.
  6. You can disable (or even delete) the wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks plugin.
  7. Go to Options > Permalinks, select Custom, and enter the following: 
    /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

…and you are done 🙂 .
Hope this helps someone who wants to move to WordPress form blogger.

Blogger 502 errors

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Few minutes ago this same blog, hosted on Blogger started giving 502 Server Error (for more than 15 minutes). I was frustrated and even thought of hosting my blog on one of my servers. I don’t know what caused the issue, but one thing I know this is not the first time and I was not alone; Even http://xooglers.blogspot.com/ was down (giving 502 errors). See http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/2050618571/in/set-72157603261415176/ for another instance where this issue shot up.

Googling for a cause landed fruitless, my likely guess is blogger servers were overloaded. Hope this doesn’t happen again.

Adding social bookmarking links to blogger

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I recently wanted to add social bookmarking links to all of my blog posts. As you might notice my blog is hosted on blogger, only way I could do that is by editing the template. I thought I would share how to get about editing the template such that you add social bookmarking links which will automatically add the post permalink and the title if possible.

To edit the template, Sign into your blogger.com account and goto Template -> Edit HTML and then select Expand Widget Templates. Search for <data:post.body/>, just after <data:post.body/><div style="clear: both;"> <!-- clear for photos floats --> insert the following code.

[code language='xhtml']

Bookmark this post with:

[/sourcecode]
Add the following code before ]]>.
[sourcecode language='css']/** Service links style **/
.service-links {
padding-top: 3px;
}
.service-links ul.links {
margin:0pt; padding:0pt;
}
.service-links ul.links li {
display:inline;
list-style-type:none;
padding: 0pt 0px;
background: none;
}
.service-links ul.links li img {
border: none;
padding: 3px;
}
.service-links ul.links li a {
border: none;
text-decoration: none;
}[/code]
Then save the template. Adding social bookmarking links and submitting your posts to social bookmarking networks would improve the visibility of your blog and help drive traffic to your blog.