Treasure Tables Now on WordPress!

I spent Labor Day importing Treasure Tables from Blogger ^[1] to WordPress ^[2], which is why things looked funny here for most of the day!

I decided to make the switch because this site, and its readership, are growing (which is great!), and I wanted a more robust platform to work with. The more I posted using Blogger, the more I felt that I was butting up against the limitations of that service — and it’s easier to switch sooner than later!

Thank you for bearing with me while I got things moved over — hopefully you’ll agree that it was worth it! For those who use Blogger and might be thinking about making this switch themselves, I’ll cover my approach here.

1. Research: I looked into WordPress and Movable Type ^[3], and weighed their advantages against the pain-in-the-butt factor of making the switch, and I took notes throughout. It’s not a hugely complicated process, but I’m glad I did my homework first.

2. Installation: My webhost, DreamHost ^[4] (affiliate link), offers a one-click install for WordPress. You make a few choices, clink “Install,” and you’re off — very cool.

3. Importing from Blogger: Losing 20+ posts and 200+ of your excellent comments in the move wasn’t an option, but fortunately clever — and generous! — people have made this switch before me. I used a custom script by Andy Skelton ^[5] to import all of my posts and comments, and followed Catsudon’s step-by-step tutorial ^[6] for that script; both are excellent. I wound up having a couple of minor problems, both fairly easily solved by reading the comments on those two sites (and neither of which affected the outcome, which was 100% good).

4. Choosing a Theme: There are oodles of themes for WordPress, and I leaned on two great resources to choose mine: the WordPress Theme Viewer ^[7] and Emily Robbins’ massive list of WordPress templates ^[8]. In the end, I settled on Connections ^[9], by Vanilla Mist ^[10], which was just about perfect for what I had in mind.

Tweaking the Site: I have good knowledge of HTML and limited knowledge of CSS, but combined with the extensive documentation on the WordPress Codex ^[11] and a willingness to play around with the files, that was enough to get the results I wanted.

So what what was I after that Blogger couldn’t provide? Four things in particular, all standard in WordPress:

• Categories
• A comment form
• Native trackback
• Great customization

Blogger’s hosted-only comments — which took you away from the site, onto a clunky comments page, and then back — were what really drove me to switch. (Well, that and Spring Clean Your Blog ^[12], a post on ProBlogger ^[13], my favorite blog about blogging — it came along at just the right time!)

Unless you just want to stick with the default template (nothing wrong with that!), WordPress requires more tinkering than Blogger — but there’s a lot more to tinker with, and I think the tradeoff is well worth it.

Welcome to the new Treasure Tables — I hope you like it!