Sunday, September 30, 2012

The End .. and VTES One

From tomorrow on I will permanently switch this blog from the blogger to the wordpress blogging platform, that is new posts will entirely . So this is the last post I will be publishing here.

Please update your bookmarks/links/rss feeds/... to

You might think, why not "extrala.wordpress.com" .. well, I was stupid. For testing reasons I had imported all of the posts to wordpress using their automatic switchover functionality to a blog with that URL. But unfortunately, only the titles of the posts were imported. So I thought, just quickly delete the blog (deleting the empty posts), re-create the blog, and then fill it up using the export/import functionality. Wrong. Dead wrong. Wordpress deletes all blogs with a given URL permanently. And I mean permanently in the sense that no person can claim the same URL ever, not even the person who had created the blog in the first place. There is (at least one) warning that the URL is gone, but hey, who reads all the error messages and warnings a software throws at you .. so extrala.wordpress.com is gone. Enter VtES One ...

One the other hand extrala.blogspot.com was initially designated as personal blog (back in 2007), so at least now the blog name reflects what the blog is actually about: VtES.

I have copied all of the blog posts to the new website (along with the comments), and will keep all of the posts on blogger at the same. I don't know for long, since apparently Google doesn't like post duplication. So I might be required to close the old blog at some point in the future.

The update from blogger to wordpress will take some time, mostly because some of the formatting is gone (especially the pictures) plus some the internal links were not transferred correctly. And since there are more than 1,500 articles I have published in the past five years, there's a lot to do ... and hopefully nothing is lost in the process.

Well that's not entirely true, the comments of those posts added in the past 10 days or so are only available on blogger, since that was the time I was moving almost all of the posts to the new platform.

There are some disadvantages of WordPress, I have already noticed while moving the blog to its new URL, some of them rather severe:
  • for the customization of the interface you often have to pay (colors, fonts, etc.),
  • the number of widgets (at least those available out-of-the-box) is much smaller than on Blogger,
  • an dynamic blogroll is not possible (that is the latest posts of a blog are shown).
On the other hand there are some advantages as well:
  • the internal editor is much nicer to use,
  • beside tags there are categories, the later you can organize hierarchically,
  • navigation within the editor is much improved,
  • ...
And remember please update your bookmarks to ..

5 comments:

Wanderer's Counsel said...

Sorry to this move be necessary.
The Blog Roll was one of my favorite features of the current blog, allowing me to check only your page and not 20+ pages.

Good luck with the move!

extrala said...

Yeah, the missing active blogroll on wordpress is a sore thumb .. I am currently looking for a solution, but there's little hope (beside hosting the whole on a server I have pay for).

floppyzedolfin said...

It's great that you could save the previous posts and transfer them over there.

Brandonsantacruz said...

Are you able to leave this blog as is without paying for it? The Blog Roll is still functioning here. If you can do that, I can always use my old bookmark to check what's going on in the blogosphere.

extrala said...

Yeah, I don't have to pay for this blog, so it will stay until further notice.

And I must admit, currently I am also using the site as well for checking what's new on the other blogs .. ;)