Following Scott Haug’s lead, I’ve moved from Blogger to Wordpress for publishing this blog, and am quite pleased with the change.

If you read this page, you’ll notice support for categories, including category specific RSS feeds, which should help readers who are interested in some but not all of the topics I just post on. You’ll also notice better search, a new visual design, and improved commenting and trackback facilities. There are a number of features behind the scenes that make my life as a blog author much simpler .

The basic install of Wordpress was extremely simple and really did take less than five minutes. However, it took a while longer to import all of my old blogger posts and comments and ensure that existing inbound links continued to work. For the benefit of other people making the shift, here are some of the things I learned.

Wordpress includes a Blogger import script, but it doesn’t migrate comments. Ed Skelton has updated the import script to migrate comments, but it still doesn’t ensure that permlinks to your site still work.

Fortunately, “Thinkcorps”:http://thinkcorps.com/2005/07/25/wordpress-blogger-import has written an additional patch that preserves permlinks. To save you the hassle of manually making the required edits, I’ve made the modified script available for download at import-blogger.php.txt

Catsutorial has a walkthrough with screenshots of how to apply the patch; you can simply use the download above, renaming it to import-blogger.php.txt.

One other gotcha: the Apache RewriteRules described in the tutorial should be place at the beginning and not the end of the .htaccess file to avoid possible conflicts with the WordPress rewrite rules.