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Spent yesterday setting up a wordpress.org blog and transferring everything I’ve written on wordpress.com over to it, AND IT WAS SO EASY!!!

It’s about an afternoon’s worth of work. WordPress.com lets you export all your blog content to an XML file, which you have to cut down to several 2MB XML files and upload one by one. The import will copy all your images over from your wordpress.com blog, and it preserves comments, categories, tags, etc.

Once everything was imported, it was a matter of installing the necessary widgets to show my flickr photos, twittering, etc. There was also some setting-tweaking to get wordpress to use descriptive links with slugs and set up the dashboard, and I did have to run through all my blogposts and re-embed the videos, since wp.com has it’s own odd way of embedding to prevent users from installing malicious code in their blogs.

The biggest hitch was when I finally transferred my domain name to the wordpress.org site. I had failed to change the settings in wp.org to use ideonexus.com, which was causing wordpress to crash. Luckily, bluehost.com technical support does weekend hours, and directed me on how to fix it. Sorry to everyone for the blog being down between 3AM and 11AM today.

WordPress.org is a lot like WordPress.com, but with some very important enhancements, like the freedom to add Digg, Stumble, and Reddit links to posts, put javascript demonstrations in posts, metadata support, put adverts on the site, and install site-traffic monitoring services with more granularity.

Plus BlueHost is infinitely better than my previous host, where all my other domains reside and will be transferring from. I regularly had to call them and give tech-support in order to get my sites working. “Okay. Now click on ‘Control Panel.’ Now click on ‘Administrative Tools.’ There should be an item called ‘ODBC.’ See that? Okay…”

I’m sure there are still bugs. I know comments entered yesterday afternoon did not get backed up, which I apologize for. If there are any major issues, please let me know. : )