The results of the review are up, and while they are specific to MLBTR, there is considerable information that all sports bloggers might want to use. These include:

• Adding an Advertise Here page
• Making RSS subscription prominent on the page, as well as including an email option
• Cleaning up the sidebar
• Tips for trying to find more relevant advertising (which should convert better)
• Adding more art (some blogs such as Roar of the Tigers already excel at this)
• Suggestions for attracting more social media love

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The biggest issue was probably that the transition seemed to break the “tables” I made using pre tags.  It didn’t seem to handle the the line breaks with in the tags well – or at all.  The result is that the the line breaks aren’t observed and it overflows the area.  Depending on the browser, this can either screw up the template, or just look really bad.

Fixing it also proves difficult using the WYSIWYG editor which tries to help too much.  I’ve found it best to turn off the editor when correcting these problems.  This can be done from the Users menu with a check box at the bottom.

The tough thing is finding all the effected posts.  If you’re comfortable with MySQL you could query the database to find all posts with the PRE tag.  It still requires a manual fix, but at least you know which posts to target.

I’ve also worked my way back to add categories.  Any posts I’ve been fixing I’ve been adding categories to.  Also, I’ve looked forward those popular posts (like interviews) and made sure that those were categorized as well.  Now I won’t categorize all 1000 posts, but I did do about 100 of them.

As for performance (visits, page views, revenue), it was tough to judge the impact because of strange traffic levels due to the holidays.  It’s something I’ll probably address in a month or so.

The first step I took was to setup a subdomain to install Wordpress to. I didn’t want to be working in the same directory as my live site. If you’re using Blogspot to host your blog, you wouldn’t need this step. You would however need to secure web hosting in the first place. After setting up the subdomain, and installing Wordpress it was time to configure Blogger. This involved changing the template (backing up the old one first of course), and changing publishing and date formatting options. Once the options were configured correctly, I published the blog to my new subdomain (test.detroittigersweblog.com). Immediately after the publish was complete I restored Blogger to my original settings. This isn’t completely necessary, it was just my own paranoia about forgetting what my previous settings were.

Fortunately, it appears that in 2.0 the import script handles the Blogger configuration for you. I haven’t tried it yet, but it appears that you simply provide Wordpress with your Blogger login information and it does the rest.

Once the blog was published to the subdomain it was time to tweak the import script. If you aren’t a programmer, I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s hard to say whether or not you’ll feel comfortable editing the script or what the results will be. I’m not a programmer, but I do have some programming experience. While I can’t write PHP, I was able to at least discern what the script was doing.

I didn’t run into any problems with editing the script, or performing the import. Where things got interesting was getting everything working afterwards.

First, my dotcomment import wasn’t very successful. What happened was that any comments that had an apostrophe didn’t get imported. This proved to be pretty easily correctable. I simply edited the script to remove the part where the posts were written into the database. I then added a single line of code to the comment importing script called addslashes that handles special characters like apostrophes.

With the comments imported, I checked to make sure that the website functioned, and that older links still worked. While the website functioned, the old permalinks didn’t work. Because I was using dotcomments in the past my pages all had a .php extension. The script I’d used to preserve permalinks had been written to accomodate .html extensions. As a result, all my post names included .php (or posttitle.php). Now I’m not sure why this worked, but I found that by changing posttitle.php to posttitlephp all my old links worked, as well as the newly created internal links. Fortunately I was able to just run an update query on the MySQL database to make the changes across all posts.

Now I hope I haven’t turned you off to migrating. There were some technical hurdles to overcome, but mine was a somewhat unique case where I had to combine a couple of workarounds. If you have been using Bloggers native comments, the process will probably be much smoother for you. The same is probably true for Haloscan comments. Also, if you have a newer blog with only a few backlinks, the permalink issue probably isn’t as important. At the same time, I wanted to highlight that it might not be a smooth transition and there might be things to overcome. Even with my problems, it only took me about 5 hours to do everything. And that includes virtually no knowledge of PHP, but some knowledge of working with databases.

I know many sports bloggers started off using Blogger. Many are still using it. Some have probably considered switching platforms, while for others it may have never crossed their minds. I’m going to do a two part post about my migration from Blogger to Wordpress. The first part (this one) will focus on my reasons for switching. Many of the reasons aren’t specific to Wordpress, and many of the same principles apply to a variety of blogging software. Wordpress just happens to be the one I picked. Part two will cover the steps I took to do it, and will be more specific to Wordpress.

Republishing Hell
One of the biggest fundamental differences between Blogger and many other solutions is static versus dynamic pages. Blogger uses static pages. To achieve this they republish pages whenever you post or change your template. Many other services use dynamic pages, where they typically use a programming language (like PHP) to query a database (typically MySQL) to generate the page when it is requested.

In my case I had nearly 1000 pages of content. Every tweak to the template, like changing links in the sidebar or changing Chitika keywords, resulted in the republishing of every one of those pages. For me this meant making all changes off hours. If I tried to republish while the east coast was awake, it would frequently timeout in the process. With dynamicaly created Wordpress pages, all I do is save changes to the template. There is no republishing because the next person to request a page will see the changes.

I don’t know if this was the biggest reason for me switching, but it was definitely the one that pushed me over.

Navigation
This is one area where I’ve always felt that Blogger was very limited. I wanted my readers to be able to find what they wanted easier, and more importantly find things they didn’t even know they wanted. From a revenue standpoint, the more pages readers are looking at, the better your chances of ad clicks. Also, if first time readers stumble upon a wealth of information, they stand a good chance to be returning visitors (or subscribers).

While Blogger offers the ability to show the 10 most recent posts, that is about it. With Wordpress users can see the preceding and following posts. There are plug-ins to show related posts. The search capability is excellent without having to use another service.

The biggest difference in terms of navigation though is probably category functionality. Blogger doesn’t allow for categories, while almost every other package does (including Wordpress). Now whether or not I’ll go back and categorize all my previous posts is doubtful. However, I will make a point to categorize my post popular posts, and I will be categorizing going forward.

Comments
When I started on blogging, Blogger didn’t offer comment functionality. I implemented Dotcomments in 2003. I was happy with dotcomments, except for the fact that the comments existed in pop-ups. I wanted them to be integrated on the page. Blogger later implemented comments, but there was no way to import all the existing comments. Plus, I hated Blogger’s implementation of comments which takes you to a different page to input the comments.

After some searching, I found that someone had written a script to allow for the import of dotcomments. This meant I could retain all the work my readers had put in, and get the type of implementation that I was looking for. Hopefully the results will be a stronger community, and improved search engine results with more content on the page.

Revenue
There have been occasions where I would have loved to integrate Adsense or Chitika ads into specific posts. Unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow for javascript inside a post. Essentially you are limited to hardcoding the ads into the template. On the other hand, there are plug-ins that make it easy to include ads within posts.

Control & Ownership
While Blogger publishes all of your pages, it controls your posts in it’s database. The advantage is that you aren’t responsible for backing up that database, plus you have a copy of your posts on static pages. The disadvantage is that you don’t have any control over your data. While I don’t really see Blogger going anywhere – especially with Google behind it – there were no guarantees. By moving the data to a database at my webhost, I gain more control. While the methods probably differ slightly, I can easily export an entire database containing several blogs in a matter of a couple clicks. The trick is actually doing it.

While there were a number of compelling reasons to switch, something had kept me from doing it. First of all, Blogger didn’t inhibit my ability to post content. The result was that I was a little lazy. Also, I was nervous about maintaining all my posts, permalinks, and content in the transition. I have recently achieved a pretty good SERP spot (#3 for detroit tigers), and didn’t want to risk compromising that by having a bunch of broken incoming links – or losing posts altogether.

But as I mentioned earlier, publishing had become so cumbersome I had to make a switch. Now the timing of the switch may seem curious, essentially on the eve of a new version being released. My thought was that I wanted to do the import while the various scripts that had been written still worked. I knew they worked with version 1.5.x, but I didn’t know if they would with version 2.0. As I’ve since learned, I probably would have been better off waiting because the new version is supposed to have improved importing. In any case, the technical steps will be covered in part 2 of this case study.