yelley.com

I’ve been a Blogger girl for years (back to the days when Yelley.com was merely Yelley.net) and before the Google acquisition a few years ago.  It was always ‘ok’, never really fantastic, wow, knock your socks off; it was merely a means to an end for someone who wanted to share photos with her mom and friends who live 1600 miles away. At one point I had it perfectly configured to post via Flickr then back through FTP to publish back with my host – 2 clicks and voila!

However I grew disenchanted with Flickr over time and eventually went back and republished the photos straight from my web server via FTP to Blogger. This was a fine alternative and with the infrequency with which I post I didn’t put a lot more thought into it. I’d redesign the website layout now and again, post when I remembered, fight with photo placement via Blogger’s kludgy interface, and then be on my merry way.

Then yesterday morning I received a notification that Blogger/Google wouldn’t be supporting posting via FTP anymore and my choice, if I decided to stay, would be to either use a blogspot address or point my domain DNS to Google. The first solution is silly: what’s the point of owning a .com if you’re just using a redirect process back to a Geocities-ish name? The second solution is even worse: I happily pay $3.95/month to Dixiesys for a place to store my web content – a place where I have complete control over my own content. I also host multiple pages and galleries on this site, not just the photoblog, so there’s really no way the second “solution” would work for me.

Instead I decided to turn in a new direction. I’d been considering migrating to WordPress for a while but neither had the time nor the inclination to take on the project. I imagined that it would take *hours* – weeks maybe – to migrate my content.

In the end, it took less than an hour.

Following the instructions here I FTP’d into my web hosting account, created a new directory, and then copied over the WordPress installation files. Then I went into my web hosting admin acocunt and created a new mysql database. I ran the WordPress install, connected the database, and that was it.

What I worried about after that was moving content and what it would take to move 5 years worth of photos and blog entries. In the end it took 5 minutes using conversion instructions I found here.

I couldn’t be more thrilled that moving was so easy. There’s still a bit of cleanup to do but 90% of the work is already done. The FTP issue is alleviated and I now have plugins and widgets to play with as well as lots to learn about customization on the WordPress platform. New shinies! There’s even a WordPress app for my iPhone if I ever feel so inclined to post on the fly.

In this case change was a good thing, and I’m a happy photoblogger once more. Now to actually post some photos…