About 6 months ago, I purchased a blog that happened to be hosted on Blogger. While Blogger is fine, I’m a Wordpress guy at heart, and I decided to finally tackle the project of moving the site from Blogger to a stand-alone Wordpress installation. Little did I know that this would turn into 4 days of frustration!

There are plenty of articles on Google that outline how to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress. Unfortunately, most of these posts are dated, and don’t reflect the changes with Blogger and Wordpress. But I found a couple of good posts here and here.

For whatever reason, I was unable to use the Wordpress import function. I came across posts from other bloggers with similar issues. The import process would get stuck midway, and that would be that. I worked around that by creating a free Wordpress.com blog, and importing the Blogger blog into that new site.

That brought me to my first hurdle - My blogger site had multple authors, and Wordpress.com wouldn’t let me add any additional users. So all of a sudden, all of my posts had the same author! Try as I might, I couldn’t find a good way to get around this. I later used the Managable plugin to change the authors on the fly.

Once the posts were imported into the Wordpress.com blog, I was then able to do an “import from Wordpress” from my new blog, and transfer all the posts and comments over to the new site. Was it a clunky transition? Absolutely! But it got the job done, and those two links above were life savers in muddling through the process.

Fix your permalinks by installing the Maintain Permalinks plugin. Be sure to follow the instructions on that page to modify your .htaccess file, so that readers clicking on your old links get redirected to the correct pages.

It’s a tedious process, but having more control over your site will benefit you in the long run.. If you have any issues, post a comment and I’ll be happy to help!

Wordpress introduced their new media gallery in v2.5, and it’s been a royal PITA. I never saw anything wrong with the old system, but the powers that be felt it necessary to tinker with it. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). I repeatedly told my writers to make sure that they were clicking on the full size radio button, but time and time again I saw that they had left it on the default choice of medium.

Determined to find a way to change the default setting, I poked around /wp-admin/includes/media.php until I found the code that needed to be changed. I’m basically moving the “checked” radio attribute from Medium to Full Size.

Find the following code in media.php:

” : ” ) . “<input type=’radio’ name=’attachments[$post->ID][image-size]‘ id=’image-size-medium-$post->ID’ value=’medium’ checked=’checked’ />
<label for=’image-size-medium-$post->ID’>” . __(’Medium’) . “</label>
<input type=’radio’ name=’attachments[$post->ID][image-size]‘ id=’image-size-full-$post->ID’ value=’full’ />


And change it to:

” : ” ) . “<input type=’radio’ name=’attachments[$post->ID][image-size]‘ id=’image-size-medium-$post->ID’ value=’medium’ />
<label for=’image-size-medium-$post->ID’>” . __(’Medium’) . “</label>
<input type=’radio’ name=’attachments[$post->ID][image-size]‘ id=’image-size-full-$post->ID’ value=’full’ checked=’checked’ />

And that’s it! Happy uploading with the new and improved WordPress media gallery.

p.s. If you don’t feel comfortable editing your media.php file, feel free to contact me, and I’ll send you a copy of my modified file. (Only applicable to people running v2.63!)

We honor the memory of those who paid the ultimate price for freedom.

Take a moment today, stop what you are doing and just think in quiet peace for 5 minutes.

You have the time.

Think about those who did pay the ultimate price for your freedom and what it means.

We are still the greatest country in the world.

We are still the place everyone wants to move to.

We are still the land of opportunity.

Often we take our freedom for granted.

Often we forget the price that others paid.

Often we forget those in the world who do not have the freedom we do.

To the men and women who are serving today.

To the men and women who have severed throughout history.

Today we take a moment to thank you and to thank God for all you have done for us.

Take time today and personally thank a veteran.

I’m amazed at the stupidity in this country.. The election became less about politics and more about “making history”.. In short, it became a race issue. I had high hopes for McCain to pull it out in the end, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

Let’s hope his Socialistic views never make it to fruition, or else this will come true:

(I just helped my buddy setup his new Republican website - Check it out at http://www.therepublicantemple.com)

Today marks one of the most important elections in US history. If you are eligble to vote, be sure to get down to the polls and make your voice heard! (And then head over to Starbucks for your free coffee, simply by telling them you voted!)

BlogRush hit the blogging scene in late 2007, and it spread like wildfire, due in part to it’s endorsements by heavy-hitting bloggers like John Chow. I always felt like the system was flawed, and only ran it on 2 or 3 of our blogs. We never saw the traffic that they promised us, but laziness kept me from removing the widget.

Now it’s official - BlogRush is dead, and if you’re still running the BlogRush widget, it’s time to remove it.

Next in my death pool is EntreCard. Another neat concept that I just don’t see making it in the long haul. We’ll see..