Sorry for the long title. I have just now finally finished moving from Blogger to Wordpress 2.0 using PHP 5 and MySQL 5.0 on IIS 6.0 (Windows 2003). To say it was painful was an understatment. Actually I would have preferred a .Net 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server environment. Sure there are a bunch out there but all super successfull blogs have been using WordPress. Most of why I wanted Wordpress was so this site could stay friendly to the search engines while at the same time getting all the tools that the community has created. I wanted this and at the same time I didn’t want to bother my casual viewers.
Blogger, well that was an even bigger pain. Uploading photos worked sometimes but seldom and I would often lose entire posts. Blogger has really lost some of their power users. Seeing as how their users use AdSense mostly, they really should have a less krappy product.
So if you to want to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, PHP 5, MySQL 5 and IIS 6.0 here are a few tidbits.
Download WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download/
Download PHP 5 from http://www.php.net
Download MySQL from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
Once you have these first install PHP. I am not going to get into the instructions here right now but don’t use the ones at PHP.net. Find somebody who has summarized it specifically for IIS and use theirs.
Next install MySQL. The key here is to make sure that you do NOT “Enable Strict Mode” if you want to import your comments from Blogger. This took me a while to find. You can do this by modifying the config via the MySql Server Instance Config Wizard under programs on your start bar.
After you got this install WordPress via the instructions they provide. If you mess up the WP install just delete the WordPress database, recreate it and install again.
When you are finally ready to install go to Blogger.com and login. Make sure you find your template and save it to a local text file. WP doesn’t tell you that they will be screwing with it so if you don’t have it saved, it will be gone forever.
Next change your publish options to publish this to a BlogSpot blog. This is key to preventing other import errors.
After that you can go ahead and “Import”, you shouldn’t lose anything as long as you’ve downloaded your template.
If you need more help, just ask!
