I’ve been writing on Blogger for quite some time and have long wished for greater control of the blog.  I like the ease of use of Blogger but it does not offer customization features that I have read are available with Wordpress.  All the old Blogger essays transferred to Wordpress without any problems.  The links still point back to Blogger but that’s OK.

I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get all the same widgets in Wordpress that I had in Blogger but I probably needed to get rid of some of them as it was beginning to look cluttered.  I wish there was a way to transfer my blogroll but it looks like that may be a manual process.  I also changed the theme to one that promotes the writing and not the design.  I like the simple header.  It speeds up mobile loading.

Update: three days later

The move is complete.  I may still add some widgets but overall, I like the look and functionality of the new site.  The biggest hurdle was transferring all my subscribers without having to ask them to subscribe to a new feed.  I simply had to break the old feed from Blogger and redirect it from here.  Easy, I know, but it took me hours to get it right.

Now I know why I waited until the three-day weekend to attempt this.  The learning curve for WordPress was not too steep, but there still were some gotchas.  The whole process was rather time-consuming but fun.  I’m ready now to do some serious SEO and to get back to writing new essays.  Oh, and respond to some of the recent comments.

No blogroll on LDC

I decided not to add a detailed blogroll but will maintain several in separate web pages.  The links are at the top left: A new LDS blog aggregators list, the top LDS group blogs, the top LDS solo blogs and a large list of LDS Message boards or forums.  These were all previously posted but have recently proven to be very popular reference pages.

Thanks to all the aggregators and fellow bloggers who have linked to the old site over the years.  I know some have already changed to the new site.  Thanks for your links.  A blog is fairly boring without readers and comments.  Your links bring me new readers every day.  I look forward to the continued dialog and hope my essays are worth reading.