If you’re reading this, then you’re looking at the newly upgraded Coder’s Block blog. Hooray!
History
I started this blog 3 years ago with a “don’t sweat the details” attitude. Part of that was using Blogger to launch my blog quickly, knowing I’d want something better in the future. Well, it took longer than expected, but I finally upgraded my blog to run on WordPress, on my domain, integrated with my portofio.
Learning WordPress
I thought this would be a weekend project. Ended up taking 3 weeks, and that’s with me rushing after Google somehow found and indexed the blog before it was ready. Still not sure how they found it.
I started by cloning the baked-in Twenty Twelve theme. Then I combed through every file and function, learning what everything did, and removing, editing, or adding to fit my needs. This is the result. I now also have a new-found respect for WordPress developers. Using WordPress is simple. Working under the hood isn’t.
Migration
And then there was the migration. WordPress has a Blogger Importer plugin, but it strips out embedded scripts. Kind of a bummer if you run a web dev blog with lots of gists, codepens, and fiddles. I also needed to do a lot of markup massaging on my posts to fit them into their new home. I ended up throwing together a quick and dirty post massager that applied 11 regexes, then I applied a few more using the Search Regex plugin, just to get things reasonably presentable. It was certainly tedious, but it also gave me a chance to review old posts and add updates as needed.
After the migration, I still had to worry about redirecting visitors from my old blog to my new one and preserving any SEO juice I had. Thankfully, the Blogger To WordPress plugin made this easy.
Loose Ends
I waffled back and forth between using the baked-in WordPress commenting system or Disqus. Finally settled on Disqus, mostly so I could offload the complexity of a commenting system out of my templates and functions.
There are some other speedbumps I encountered, and I few tricks I picked up, but those are probably better saved for other posts.