Why did the chicken refuse to cross the road...?

Because crossing over to Wordpress was just too damn hard and scary!

Even though staying with Blogger has become a right royal pain in said chicken's arse!

You know the old saying 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'?

Well it was broken all right, good and proper.

I tried to fix it, tried to change it, decided to defect, got overwhelmed, stayed where I was, found a magic solution, fixed it  yay, then it broke again, I cried - coz it was finally beautiful again and then it was ugly.  Again.  I tried everything but this time it turns out that it was Blogger that broke and hundreds if not thousands of people are in the same boat as me now...

Do I feel better knowing that it wasn't my fault?  Not really.

I'm about to go off on a tangent here, so if you don't want to read about my Wordpress worries just skip down the page a bit.


Late last year there was some sort of glitch in my blog that made many of my pictures, including the title picture, vanish to be replaced to be replaced with something that looked like this...

So I tried to fix it.  But I couldn't.  For some reason that template (the thing that makes it look the way it does) wouldn't let me do anything, so I had to change the template completely.

You can read about that little adventure here.

I never liked the new one and as I was getting absolutely no joy with trying to recreate what I had, I made the decision to switch to Wordpress.

Now, everyone that has a Wordpress blog raves about how wonderful they are, how easy they are to use, and how much freedom you have to customise it - which is perfect for me.  Indeed when I checked it out, there are simply thousands of templates to choose from, and so very many really pretty ones.

But the more I looked into it, and the more posts I saw in a FB group devoted to Aussie bloggers  most of whom seem to be on Wordpress, the more I began to doubt that decision.

You see a huge slice of the topics and questions on there are about Wordpress related things that have suddenly stopped working, and which 'plug-ins' are best, and spam, and who to use for a hosting service, and what to do with your email subscription list, and why have their stats dropped, and how to best optimize your SEO's, and what framework to use, and trolls, and solicitations, and the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org... and all of that without even touching the whole migrating your blog thing.

Is it that they seem to be more of the serious 'blogging is my business and my life' type of blogger who are right into the nitty gritty of it all, whereas I am of the 'what's a plug-in*? I just really like to blog and don't care if it never goes anywhere' camp...

Wordpress certainly do have beautiful templates, but to have the level of customization that I want, I have to buy the premium upgrade, and most likely the template as well because most of the ones I love aren't the free ones.

A typical Wordpress template.  So pretty...

Basically I just like to be able to more or less click, drag, and drop, or upload pictures from my computer without any hassle.

I'm not interested in knowing about SEO's, or stats, or how it works, only that it does work.

Back on track now! Kind of...

While continuing to research on whether to switch or not, I came across what I thought was the perfect solution.  Wordpress templates that had been adapted for use in Blogger!  Perfect!  The Blogger templates are all fairly ugly and boring and I found one that was really cute.

So I read up all about it, was more confident than I had been in weeks, and downloaded it.

Then using the Blogger tutorials, I followed their instructions on how to back up my blog before trying anything drastic.

First I had to download the current template that I had customised, to my hard drive.  Okay.  Done. So far so good.

Then it said, to download the entire blog to my hard drive, which would ensure all my posts and comments were safe, and if the worst happened, then all I would need to do would be to restore it from the saved file.  Done.  Too easy.

The next step was to upload the new template from my computer and click apply.  Simple.  What could possibly go wrong.  Right?  Right??

That was when I discovered that there was not a single element that could be customised.  Not one.

Oh well.  No biggie.  Because I was a clever girl and had backed up my content.

So I restored it.

Except that it didn't restore.

It said that the template file I had saved  successfully I thought  had no files in it.

So there was nothing to upload.

FML

On the bright side, somehow I haven't lost any content at all.  So I have that going for me.  Which is nice.

I had another little cry, and began all over again.  Again.  This time all I was going for was something that could actually be used.

It was a long slow process which entailed logging out and in again every time I wanted to change something, which was a pain, but which worked nicely until I got to  the background, it just did not want to change.

Every time I tried to do it, my computer froze, so I jumped onto the forums to find an answer.  Which I couldn't find until this morning when I had just about given up.  I was about to ask for help from the forums, and from Blogger when  Lo and behold the first post was from Blogger saying its actually their issue and that they're looking into it!

Huzzah!

So now I just have to hurry up and wait.

After all this, what have I learned?

I've learned that unless you can afford to have a professional do the migration for you, save yourself the grief.

I've learned that I didn't actually need the 'Wordpress for Dummies' guide that I bought, what I did in fact need was 'Wordpress for Dummies - For Dummies'!

But most of all, what I've learned is don't believe everything you read!

Especially if you're reading it on the World Wide Inter-Webby thingy...

* A 'plug in' is a gadget-widget-app-thing-a-ma-jig that you add to your site to make it do different things.  Think along the lines of the pop-ups on sites that ask you to sign up to their email list, or the things that sit down the sidebar of your blog, or photo galleries... they're all plug ins.