Moving Pains

Image source: Grongar

I have spent the last week moving my site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. It hasn’t been a smooth transition as advertised online. What is the difference between the two platforms? Well, imagine both of them are two cars; WordPress.com would be the automatic car while WordPress.org is the manual version. Why then did I make the move from an automatic car to a manual or ‘stick’ car?

The reason is because WordPress.org provides greater control and flexibility which its dot com sibling does not provide. It also offers me the opportunity to customise my website to my liking. WordPress.org allows you to use cool plugins to customise your site to your specification. There is a plugin for everything you need or want your site to do. Think of plugins as the equivalent of apps for Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Without plugins, your WordPress.org website is pretty much a useless and empty shell.

I have always planned to make the switch but procrastinated until last week when it finally felt right to go ahead with the move. My main concern had always been with regards to smoothly moving all my subscribers (email and rss) from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.

It is said that the migration from WordPress.com to WordPress.org is usually smooth for most people. It was not for me. Most of my blog posts’ images failed to get transferred in the transition so I had to spend several nights including the weekend manually updating my blog posts’ images. It is a mind-numbing  task especially when you are working on  70 blog posts which had missing images.

My good friend, @samuelodekunle, helped ensure that I did not sink into despair and regret over the decision to switch blogging platforms. There were several other issues that arose and I had to make repeated phone calls to him on a daily basis for advice and support. I also had to Google for information on practically every technical problem I encountered, watch several WordPress YouTube video tutorials and made a few phone calls to my hosting provider for technical support as well. The last seven days has been my longest week this year.

I am proud of the minor tweaks I have made to the site. It still looks the same but it has a different and more powerful engine under the bonnet. Check out the new founder’s page which is much better than the old one. I saw a similar one used by @samuelodekunle on his site and he graciously helped me create one for my site. I like the new social media sharing buttons which I hope you would use to share blog posts with friends.

I would definitely recommend WordPress.com for those who want to get their toes into the blogging waters before  tackling WordPress.org. It is free unlike WordPress.org which requires you to get a hosting provider.

I hope  that my technical challenges and moving pains are behind me so I can focus my time and energy on the content for the blog. I plan to make further minor tweaks to the site over the coming weeks. This is with the intention of improving your experience of using the website. I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback on the new site.