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!

Tags: Blogger, blogging, export, import, Typepad, WordPress, WordPress Bootcamp
Filed under WordPress Bootcamp |

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!

Tags: blogging, domain names, how to, tutorial, web hosts, WordPress
Filed under WordPress Bootcamp |

So, dear readers, I’m going to make you work for it today.  Most days, I’m happy to just let you all sit back and just read without giving any sort of feedback or anything but NOT SO TODAY.  Oh no, I need you all to help me out with some things.  That’s going to mean clicking out of your feed reader and leaving a comment.  It’s a lot to ask, I know, because there are so many fabulous blogs to be reading and mine is just yet another drop in the bucket.  BUT… I don’t ask for much and this would make me happy.  You want to make me happy, don’t you?

I thought so.

First off, I’m thinking of doing a series of posts on various WordPress “How To’s”.  Things like getting started with WordPress including how to move off sites like Blogger and Wordpress.com, finding a theme and how to use it, what plugins are, where to find them and how to use them, etc and so forth.  But what I REALLY want to know is what YOU guys want to know.  Particularly those of you on Blogger or Wordpress.com.  What’s stopping you from switching to self-hosted Wordpress?  What are you nervous about when it comes to WordPress?  What do you want to know?  Tell me your burning questions and I’ll answer them in this series.  Sound good?

Edited to add: I guess my big question is: What is keeping you on Blogger and away from WordPress (as in, what do I need to do to convince you to move??)?

Okay, next order of business: Have you seen the new Savvy Source widget I have over there in the righthand sidebar?  Sure is purty, isn’t it?  Anyhow, if you have a moment or two, take the quiz because it’s for a good cause (not just putting $ in my pocket, which it does that, but also there’s the whole children’s eductation benefit).  You don’t have to tell me if you’ve taken the quiz or not, but I wanted to point it out either way.  Also, if you’re interested in running this widget on your own blog, I have some invites available to the first five people who want them.  So if that’s you, then you do have to tell me.  Otherwise, how would I know?  I don’t read minds, yo.

Here’s another question for you guys: What do you think of the blog, in general.  All criticisms about writing aside, how do you like it?  Is the design working for you all?  Are there any features to the design or the blog in general that you love or hate?  Anything that I don’t do that you’d like to see?  Would you like to see a different look?  Do you have any issues with the current design (doesn’t load correctly, etc)?  Sound off!  Give it to me with both barrels.  I WANT TO KNOW.  I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know.

I think that’s all the questions I have for now.  If I think of anything else, I’ll be sure to let you know.  And I want to thank you ahead of time for your answers.  I’m continually amazed by the fabulous people who read this blog.  You guys, quite honestly, are the wind beneath my internet wings.

Tags: blogging, comments, design, Q&A, WordPress
Filed under Boring Site Stuff |

I thought I’d do something different today.  I want to take a look back at my “internet history”, sordid as it may be.  (And it is.)  So the best place to start?  The beginning.

Okay, that’s probably too far back.  But, gosh, wasn’t I adorable?  You can’t deny it.  I sure had the whole “baby” thing going for me.  I wonder what happened.  Because somewhere along the way I went from “Aww, how cute!” to “Eesh!  Put some makeup on, woman!”  But looking at this picture, I can see influences on my own children which is pretty freakin’ cool if you ask me.

But yes, advanced as I was as a wee thing, the technology wasn’t there (not at our house, at least) and I was not quite yet on the internet.  Give it a couple years.

My dad worked for IBM so you would have thought we would have lived on the cutting edge.  Alas, this is not so.  My dad did at one point in the 80’s bring home one of those old dinosaur IBM computers and I remember for a while it was set up in my room and he would come in before I was awake in the morning and dial in to the IBM whatchamacallit and… do what exactly?  I don’t know.  But I remember hearing the phone dialing in the computer’s (extremely loud) speakers and the resulting beeps and boops as it connected.  WILD.

There was a small amount of internet going on in high school but for the most part is was learning all about Tetris and Solitare (all the computers in all the classrooms AND the library had Solitare!  SWEET!).

I went to Nevada to go to school and my friends… did not.  One stayed behind in San Jose and another went to school clear out in MICHIGAN.  That fall was rough as I would hike to the post office in hopes of letters.  And my dearest friend in Michigan began to urge me to get an “email account”.  WTF?  Email?  Why would I want to do that??  I had no computer of my own, anyhow, and was forced to use the computer lab for writing papers.  Finally, I signed up.

It was all downhill from there.

I think my first email address was something like mskurtz@unr.edu.  I could be wrong because it has been EVER SO MANY YEARS and I only have so many brain cells left.  I do remember we had to use “PINE” to access the email.  Graphic based?  Only in our dreams!  I think it was only the VERY NEXT DAY that I had some very helpful friends on campus show me what a “talker” was.  Do any of you out there remember “talkers”?  It was what they called chat rooms before there was chat rooms.  The one I started out on was called “Crossroads” and it was, as far as I knew, the biggest of it’s kind.  It wasn’t a game, like a MUDD (which I did get into along the way, never fear), but rather a big, text-based, multi-”roomed” program that allowed a bunch of nerdy college kids to chat with one another.  Essentially.  I became something of an internet flirt.  I was able to email and (once I talked her into logging in) chat with my friend in Michigan and I met new friends. We eventually migrated to our “own” smaller talker, “Eye of the World.”

I thought I was terribly clever.

It wasn’t long before I was trying out MUDDS and the like.  I got hooked up with one from some guys that I had actually MET in person.  They were decent fellows, which looking back, I realize is nothing short of a MIRACLE.  (Evie, don’t you ever THINK of doing anything I did.)  I lost a lot of my college existance in MUDDs, actually.  Between that and the talkers, it was a miracle I (eventually) graduated.

Lucky for me, I met someone my junior year of college and he sort of mellowed me out.  (I also used to wear a lot of baggy-ish clothes.  WTF?  I wanna go back in time and tell my dumbass self to enjoy the relative skinniness while I had it…)  But I turned him into an internet addict too.  Actually, while I tell people that we met on a camping trip, that’s not altogether accurate.  See, I had just learned about this awesome thing called “Geocities” and had spent a goodly amount of time in the dorm computer lab putting together my own monstrosity of a webpage together (I was located in Hollywood, I think).  And, for whatever reason, I bookmarked it on the computer I tended to use the most often so that I could go back and access it easily.  It just so happens that one day this older fella was using that computer and browsing the bookmarks and found this webpage of mine.

I was hunched over another computer at the time, talking feverishly to my friend in Michigan about something that was undoubtedly important.  I can’t remember NOW, of course, what it was but I do remember the urgency of the moment.  I hear this person, who I have no idea who they are, say “Marilyn!”  My head whipped around and I saw this older fella.  I think I glared at him.  “I like your webpage,” he said.  I grunted, perhaps a rudimentary “thanks”, perhaps not, before returning to my conversation.

Talk about your auspicious beginnings!  You can see why I stick to the camping story.

ANYHOW.  The point is, I got my dumb self on Geocities in the fall of 1996.  I learned how to fiddle with HTML and such things and got a real taste for having a presence on the web.  I LIKED IT.  I would continue for the next several years to maintain Geocities webpages and other sorts of webpages on other various servers.  At first, it was all about the FREE.  Free was good.

When that older fella (his name is Kile, btw) and I got married in August of 1998, I was still doing the Geocities thing.  And the MUDD thing.  What can I say?  Then I got pregnant in the spring of 1999.  I joined an expectant mom’s email group for gals due in November of 1999 and got embroiled in that.  I kept an offline diary of my pregnancy from virtually the moment I found out.  Why not online?  I don’t know, but I was something of a fuddy duddy and there was something about paper and pen that I enjoyed embracing.

I would continue to journal offline through my son’s infancy and the ensuing years where we tried to get pregnant (AND FAILED).  I would also continue with email groups and eventually an online message board group over at the Ovusoft Forums.  I still marvel at how I was STILL not journaling online at this point.  No, what I did instead was start playing The Sims.  And then, because I am a ginormous nerd, I started up my own Sims website.  See, you could “make stuff” for the game.  I joined an existing site for the purpose of selling my “wares” before eventually setting up my own site.  I had a friend help me through the process of signing up for my own webhost account and getting a domain name configured.  Enter: HOSTGATOR.  Gosh, when was that?  It was the summer of 2003, I think.  I’d already been in The Sims website game for nearly 2 years at that point. My first url was simlair.com.

It took about 18 months before I thought about blogging myself.  I had certainly heard of blogs by this point.  But, to be honest, I thought they were more for “kids”.  Teenagers and college kids.  I saw them as more of a social networking thing.  This was until a friend showed me some blogs of some infertile women out there, one in particular.  I was hooked from then on.  And it was via Julie’s blog and her awesome blogroll that I found a lot of the other blogs that I still read today.  And I was encouraged to start my own blog.  Which I did.  ON BLOGGER.

*bangs head on the wall*

It took me about 5 days to wake up from THAT and set up WordPress on my Hosgator account.  So my first blog url was inconceivable.simlair.com.  OH YES.  And I remember my first design too.  I had to do that because I couldn’t stand the default look and there was virtually NOTHING out there for chick bloggers that I could find.  I figured if there wasn’t anything available, I’d make my own.  By New Years 2005, I had a WordPress blog and my own custom design.  GO ME.  I (obviously) haven’t looked back since.

The internet has been a huge part of my life, that’s for sure.  Blogging has been an even LARGER part of my life.  I had to go through some painfully geeky periods of my life before I got here, but I got here.  And I guess you could say I’m STILL geeky.  And I would have to bow my head and say, “Yes, you’re right.”  But at least I’m geeky in the company of some awesome women.

BLOGGERS RULE.

Tags: about me, blogging, college, Kile, origin
Filed under It's All About Me |