I’ve Survived the Move from Posterous to WordPress

I’m ridiculously excited that I’ve shifted across to WordPress. I had to make the move because my previous blogging platform, Posterous, will be shut down at the end of April by its relatively new owner, Twitter. It’s a shame.

So this blog looks different from today: a little more (ahem) sophisticated with extra features such as a home page, category clouds, a little tweet feed, and ‘Anne’s Best Work’. These appear in the website sidebar, all thanks to widgets. Posterous didn’t do widgets – and I didn’t know what I was missing!

Did the move to WordPress go smoothly? Well it consumed innumerable woman hours over the past 10 days, which is why I’ve slipped below the radar of late. I found it easy to export blogposts from Posterous and I knew I could transfer my domain name. But I realized after a couple of days work that I’d lose my facebook ‘likes’ and tweet ‘counts’ if I signed up for a normal WordPress blog. This came as a shock – I feel very attached to my ‘likes’!

Therefore, I opted for the self-hosted version of WordPress on the advice of my son (Who Knows Everything). With the self-hosted WordPress blog I can fiddle around with the blogpost URLs so they match the format of the blogpost URLs on Posterous. When these URLs do match, the ‘likes’ and ‘counts’ migrate with the domain name. Phew!

Getting geeky

One particularly time-consuming operation involved re-categorizing my individual blogposts. In Posterous, each blogpost has one, or several, subject tags. With WordPress I can specify categories as well as tags for each blogpost so I trawled through making changes. I’ve decided that I should only specify a category if I’ve written a minimum five blogposts on that subject (that’s a rule I know I’ll break). Less than five, and the subject becomes a tag. So ‘self-publishing’ is a category but ‘proofreading’ is a tag. This is already sounding quite geeky, isn’t it?

As a result of this new learning experience, I now know what to do with an API key. And I’m getting to grips with Search Engine Optimisation with the Plug-In WordPress SEO by Yoast.

Of course, everything is slightly different so I apologize in advance for any goofs.

And I think I’ve learned my lesson: it’s safer to start out with a product/program that’s a market-leader. That’s the Big Bad World for you.