WordPress here I come ..... I think.

This blog, leaving from Platform Blogger will hopefully arrive at WordPress in a few days.   I apologise for the delay which was due to leaves on the line and my general blogging incompetence.

My brain hurts.  I have been trying to move this blog over to WordPress for weeks now and I feel it would be easier to crack the enigma code. 

Currently I am blogging to a handful of WordPress and Blogger users and the number of views I get really doesn’t inspire me to continue putting finger to keyboard.   I was advised some months ago to move to wordpress to increase my visibility/views and blogging interaction and I can’t argue that this makes sense.  Trying to find and interact with bloggers using Google’s Blogger is like looking for a needle in a well hidden haystack.

I’ll say this about Blogger.....  It’s really easy to set up and use.  I don’t understand all the terminology in ‘settings’ but the interface is friendly and straightforward.  And it costs nothing to operate ad-free.

But since setting up my WordPress account, I can see how much more versatile it is and I like the way you can interact using Reader etc..

So I set up a WordPress blog.  It was not an easy process for someone digitally challenged like me but I think I now have the basis of a blogsite, albeit using just the free account with sneaky ads imposed and a rather basic template. 

As I couldn’t bear to see my Blogger blogs disappear into cyberspace, I thought I would import my Blogger blogs to my WordPress site. Now this should have been relatively easy.  I just needed to follow the instructions for exporting the back-up file and importing it to Wordpress.  When I looked at the result though, some inexplicable things had happened.  Font style, size and paragraph gaps had been changed and varied between posts, apostrophes were being preceded by a backslash, comments to some of my posts were included and some weren’t, and some posts were duplicated.  I also noticed that a considerable number of blank pages with un-openable jpegs had been included. 

This was a job for the Wordpress ‘happiness engineers’.  Well, happily they fixed the apostrophe gremlin and then I had to delete all the posts before re-importing my posts.  This worked although it wouldn’t let me delete the other rogue ‘draft posts’.  Nor did I find the comments made on my posts.  However, I could at least draft my first WordPress blog post.  I have to say I found this about as intuitive a process as filling in a self-assessment tax return for the first time.  I was going to need to train up on this.

This is all very well but the joy of blogging, for me at least, is just writing and sharing something quickly, not studying, doing on-line Blogging courses, watching video tutorials, learning Block editor, Permalinks, and working out what apps and plug-ins I need etc.  I haven’t the time so I’ll just carry on busking it and hopefully I will improve and tidy up as I go along.

So long as I make progress without too many headaches, I will continue to work with Wordpress.  If I struggle, I might just give up blogging and sell my soul to the devil and tweet nonsense on Twitter.

Watch this space.