WordPress Bootcamp

First of all, I want to thank everyone for their enthusiastic reception of last week’s WordPress Bootcamp.  This is something I’ve been meaning to work on for months now and I have just put it off and put it off and seeing how much everyone really enjoys and NEEDS the information, well, it just makes me glad that I finally got the lead out and got working on this.

As I promised many of you, I plan to cover moving from Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com this week.  Last week, as you may recall, we learned how to get a domain name and a hosting account and set up WordPress.  This is the logical next step if you’re moving from another platform.

I can understand being nervous.  For many of us, our blogs are our lives (or is that just me?).  And the fear of losing all our posts and comments and categories and tags… well that can be rather daunting.  But this is why we backup everything first, so that we can “fix it” (or pay someone else to fix it) if something goes wrong.  Not that anything will because moving to WordPress is SO EASY.  So lets get started, shall we?

Importing from Blogger

They honestly couldn’t have made this any easier.  First, from your WordPress Admin panel, locate the “Import” tab.  It’s under “Manage”.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Click on “Blogger” and you’ll see a screen that looks something like this:

The only real caveat you need to be aware of here is that you need to have a Google account.   But since Google ate Blogger, chances are you have one.  And if you don’t, you really should have one because JEEBUS, Google is pretty important to bloggers.  Somewhere along the way, you’re going to want to use their services.  So just get an account already.  The importer also tells us you want to have an upgraded blog account on Blogger or a custom domain (not FTP).  I’m pretty sure that’s almost everyone but then again, I don’t know much about Blogger.  So when you’re ready to go, just hit the “Authorize” button.  You’ll see a screen like this:

You get an authorization screen.  Basically it’s asking you if you’re sure you want your WordPress blog to be able to access your Blogger account.  The answer is yes, so go ahead and click “Grant Access”. Then you get a screen like this:

You’ll see your Blogger account listed and it’ll also give you a count of all the posts and comments that will be imported.  Good to know!  When you’re ready, just click the “Import” button underneath “The Magic Button” column.  And voila!  Now, if your browser locks up (which isn’t unheard of if you have a ton of posts and comments), just hit the “Clear account information” button to restart.  You’ll want to go back to square one and start over, but the good news is that the importer will skip posts and comments that have already been imported so a) you won’t have duplicates and b) maybe it won’t take as long.

And that is it.  SERIOUSLY.  That is all you have to do.  EASY.

Importing from Typepad

Now, I have less experience with this, seeing as how I’ve never had a Typepad or Movable Type account to import.  The good news is, the importer makes it easy.  So back at the “Import” screen that I showed you up in the “Importing from Blogger” section, you want to click on the “Import from Movable Type and Typepad” link.  You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

This importer requires you to do one of two things.  Well, actually first you need to do one thing and then you need to decide which of the two things you want to do.  The one thing is: export your entries from Movable Type or Typepad (whichever you’re using).  Now, I can’t tell you how to do that.  But I bet if you Google “export from Typepad” or the like, you’ll find some instructions.  The important thing is that when you export, you’ll have a text file called “mt-export.txt”.

Either save this file to your computer (remembering where you saved it to, of course, I generally save things to my My Documents folder since that’s easy to remember) or upload it to your shiny new webhost using FTP and save it to the “/wp-content/” folder of your new WordPress install.  If all that FTP stuff is greek to you, don’t worry.  Just save the text file to your computer.

If you saved the file to your computer, just click the browse button to locate it and then hit the “Upload file and import” button to start the import.

If you FTP’d the file to your “/wp-content/” folder, then click the “Import mt-export.txt” button.

Both do the same thing, so don’t worry about the other button if you have already chosen to do the import one way, okay?  And like with the Blogger import, sometimes the browser might lock up if you have a lot of entries or comments.   NEVER FEAR.  You upload and import the “mt-export.txt” file multiple times without fear of duplicate entries, the importer will just pick up where it “left off”.  Just keep at it until everything is uploaded.

Importing from WordPress.com

This is also a very easy task.  And the good news is that EVERYTHING will be imported.  Not just the posts and comments, but categories, links, pages… you name it.   First, from your WordPress.com account, you want to go to Manage and then the “Export” tab.  You’ll see a screen like this:

Don’t pay attention to the “Restrict Author” part, unless it’s part of a group blog.  But most of us don’t have to worry about that, so just go ahead and click hte “Download Export File” button.  You’ll have a “.wxr” file saved to your computer.  Then, you want to go to the “Import” screen in your new WordPress install (as I pointed out in the “Importing from Blogger” section above) and at the bottom of the screen is a link that says “WordPress” for importing from WordPress.  Go ahead and click it.  You’ll see a screen like this:

Browse to the file you downloaded from your WordPress.com blog and then click “Upload file and import”.  Should be as easy as that.  (Can’t say as I know as I’ve never had to actually do it, but everything I hear is that it’s a piece of cake.)

So there you have it.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll see if I can help you out.  Also, if you have any suggestions for what you’d like me to talk about next week, let me know in the comments as well.  Otherwise, I’ll find another fun WordPress topic to talk about (there are a lot to cover!).  I hope this helps some of you who are wanting to move to take the final plunge.  If you want someone to hold your hand, let me know.  You can do it!

As promised, here is my WordPress Bootcamp Series.  This series is inspired by your questions and questions I’ve seen many bloggers have over the years and by a desire to convert every user of Blogger to switch to WordPress already.  I have dreams and goals, people.  Actually, if I can help just one person in their quest towards WordPress nirvana, I will consider this series a raging success.

Today, we’re going to start with the basics.  Getting Started.  This particular installment is going to assume that you have already made the decision to move to WordPress (I’ll get to the whining begging pleading convincing at a later date).  But making the decision is only part of the battle.  Where do you go from there?  How do you go from, “I want a WordPress blog!” to actually having a WordPress blog?

Get a Domain Name

It’s pretty simple, actually.  And it starts with a domain name.  Now, some people who use Blogger have a domain name already that is mapped to their Blogger account.  But most do not.  So where do you start?  Well you need to think of a good domain name.  For most people, this is the name of their blog.  Whichever you choose, you need to make sure it’s available.  Most domain name registrars will let you know before purchase if your domain is available with a simple lookup utility.

I use NameCheap because… it’s cheap (hello, it’s in the name!).  It used to be $8.88 a year but it went up like fifty cents or something like that.  Big deal.  So you have your name and you set up an account and you purchase it.  Now what??

Finding a Host

Now you need a host.  You need to find a web host.  Now, a simple Google search will show you that the possibilities are endless.  What do you choose?  What features of a host should you look for?  What should you stay away from?  ACK!  I changed my mind!  I’m scared!

Never fear.  I’m here to help.

I’ve worked with a lot of web hosts in the last several years.  Back when I did blog design, I had the misfortune to work with some really deplorable web hosts, actually.  One thing I can tell you without hesitation?  STAY AWAY FROM YAHOO HOSTING.  It looks so easy.  They promise you easy, no-fuss hosting of your blog.  “Perfect!” you think.  That’s just what you want.  RESIST, I say.  I beg you.  Save yourself the headache, PLEASE.

The problem is that Yahoo Hosting is too easy.  And there are a lot of features that, while they seem to be for advanced users, that having them makes life easier for anyone using WordPress.  And Yahoo doesn’t offer a lot of these features.  So stay away from it.

I use HostGator.  And yes, that is an affiliate link.  Which means I get $$ if you click that link and then sign up for hosting.  I’ve been with HostGator for years now.  I first signed up with them back in 2003.  They are an insanely easy host to work with.  Anyhow, when you sign up, you give them the domain name you registered for before.  They’ll in turn give you some “nameserver addresses”.

You need to go back to wherever you registered your domain name (in my case, NameCheap) and log into your account and find where you can “manage” your domain name.  Then you should find a link somewhere for editing nameserver or DNS information.  If you’re having trouble, ask customer support and they should point you in the right direction.  You put in the new “nameserver addresses” and voila!  You may need to wait a few hours for everything to “catch up” but your domain name will now point to your newly purchased web site!  Woo hoo!

You are also given a “CPanel” with login information.  CPanel looks an awful lot like this:

CPanel lets you do just about anything, easily, to your site.  You can control email addresses, check stats, upload files, add in scripts and gizmos and doo-dads and all sorts of other stuff I don’t even know about.  At the very bottom of the CPanel screen is an icon that is called “Fantastico”.  And fantastic it is.

You see, from here you can pick any of the goodies listed there on the left side and install them on your web site JUST LIKE THAT.  Literally, it’s filling out a few blanks and clicking a button.  It doesn’t get any easier, folks.  You’ve got everything from photo albums to message boards to shopping carts to content management systems and… blogs.  Yes, blogs.  And look what we have here?

Installing WordPress

Woo hoo!  This is how I first learned about WordPress, actually.  I have mentioned before that I started out on Blogger and then switched a few days later to WordPress.  I already had my web site here and I got to looking around at Fantastico.  I checked out the other “blog” programs provided but none of them seemed as good as WordPress.  So I went with that. I knew nothing at the time about Movable Type.  I went with WordPress because it was easy.  SO EASY.

Seriously, this is what it looks like.  In the first blank, if you want your blog to be your domain name, you just leave it blank.  If you want your blog to be at http://yourdomain.com/blog, then you would put “blog” in that blank.  Make sense?  Just make sure the directory doesn’t already exist (which means, don’t make a “folder” or anything else with that name on the account before this step or it won’t work.  If you don’t understand, then don’t worry, it probably won’t apply to you).

Next, you pick out a username and password.  Easy as pie, right?  Just be sure to remember it!  Write it down somewhere and don’t lose it!

In the next section, “Base configuration”, you pick out a nickname.  For instance, if your login username from the previous section was “admin” but you want to sign your posts “Joe Bob”, you would put “Joe Bob” in the nickname spot.  Then you put in an email address.  This could be the email that your web site is tied to or your gmail account or wherever you’d like to receive notices when people make comments, etc and so forth.

Site name and description should be fairly obvious.  For instance, my blog the site name would be “slackermama . com” and the description would be “making little kids cry since 1999″.  Yours could be “Mommy Needs a Time Out” and “going crazy since 2004″ or somesuch.  Make sense?

After you fill all that out, just click “install” and voila!  You get another screen that is basically an “are you sure” sort of screen and you need to click a button to finish the install.  And then you’re done.  You have WordPress!  You are given the URL to your admin account which is basically your domain plus “wp-admin” (for instance: http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin).  Use your newly minted username and password to log in and now you can write posts, add links, manage the design and add plugins and… well, the sky is the limit!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  All that good stuff is for the weeks to come.  Right now, the important thing is we know how to get started with WordPress.  Next week we’ll learn what to do with it once we have it!  In the meantime, keep the questions coming!