Well, it hasn’t been easy but my transition from Blogger to WordPress is finally complete. I’m sure I’ll find another thousand gadgets and gizmos in the meantime to add here and there, but I finally have all the posts organized and filed which was not exactly an easy task.

For starters, the migration from Blogger to WordPress could have been a hell of a lot easier. There is a tool in WordPress that is supposed to allow you to directly pull your posts and comments over from Blogger, but it unfortunately didn’t work for me on WordPress.org. So thanks to some advice I found on the WordPress forums, I imported the posts first to a WordPress.com blog and then to my custom hosted blog here. Seems like a relatively simple thing but it ended up being about 1 1/2 days of chaos because I had to break down the import file into smaller sections to prevent time out errors. Still easier than copying each one manually and I would have been too depressed to leave behind over 900 posts on my blogs, so I’m very happy it worked in the end.

WordPress isn’t quite as idiot proof as Blogger but with the right plug-ins, you can accomplish everything you want here and more. So I thought sharing a few of the widgets that made my life easier might be useful for someone else suffering through the transition.

One of the things I found really frustrating during the migration is the fact that your tags in Blogger become categories in WordPress. This wouldn’t be so bad except it left me with about 300 categories which is just insane. Thankfully WordPress has a category to tag converter which will just copy the tags over…but you still need to go through later and put all the posts into categories. Since there is no bulk selection for categories like in Blogger, I thought I would have to go post by post to organize everything – but yesterday I found this cool little Batch Category plug-in (by Rob Miller) that basically saved my sanity. (Unfortunately his site seems to have gone down but maybe you can try again: http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/batch-categories)

For those who love all things Google (which I do although I hate myself for it every day), you can pick up the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in and the Google Analyticator plug-in which will have your blog indexed in no time and allow you to see all the traffic that’s flowing in. Now I just need to get AdSense set up and we’re good to go!

Another nifty little tool I’m using is the Add to Any Share/Save plug-in which allows readers to network posts without any effort from me. I love it!