I should say it was a quick decision to move my blog to own domain. I had no plans of purchasing the new domain until last weekend when I went home (Kochi). I browsed through couple of sites which were giving domains at low cost. One such site was Netfirms, which was offering domains as low as 4.95 $ per year. I just went through their offer to get more details about this offer. They were giving only 25 MB storage space and 1 GB data transfer per month. I knew it would be too small space they are providing, but still I went on to purchase it. I just checked the availability of my domain and found that it was available.
After purchasing the domain, I had very little idea about hosting and how to go about it. I had read about Joel Caleb’s experiences in purchasing the domain in Freizeit forum. So thought I would mail him and get the details. His help was really useful for me in getting the hosting space. So I got the 200 GB hosting space and 6 TB bandwidth space. I installed WordPress 2.1 in my server and created an account. After this I uploaded a few themes to the themes directory. I selected a few themes from the list of 84 beautiful themes listed by Smashing Magazine.
Next was the big task of importing all the posts from Blogger. Initially I had moved all posts from Blogger to my free WordPress account few days back. So I thought same would be available here also. But to my disappointment, only old blogger was supported, thats without the Google login. So I was not able to import it.
Another idea struck in my mind and what I did was to import all posts to my free WordPress account and then create an xml file for all posts using the export feature in WordPress. Then I imported this file to my server using file upload and I could retrieve all my previous posts to my new server. There are also other ways to retrieve the posts as mentioned by Joel Caleb in his blog
Next it was time to customize my theme and add all the widgets and other stuffs which were present in my previous blog. It was little difficult for me this time as all the files were .php, but I managed to edit it and give a new look for my blog.
What really amazed me is the number of plug-ins available for WordPress and many of them were really useful ones. I installed quite a few of them and my new blog is up and running with all the features. Technically I should say its in Beta version or Life Rocks ! 2.0 Beta as it would go for few more changes in the coming days.
For all my readers, thanks for supporting me and hope to get more and more suggestions and feedback. Please spare a few seconds to update links to my site and also bookmark this new site.
I would like to thanks Joel Caleb for his immense help in getting me this domain and his technical help in hosting.
Technorati tags: Life Rocks 2.0, Blogger, WordPress, Google, Netfirms
Hi Nirmal, Congrats! U finally made the much awaited move. The current theme is really cool. Thnx for letting us know abt the way u moved to over to this new domain 🙂
Your blog rocks:!:
Hey congrats on the successful migration to your own domain. Nothing beats the feeling of having your own domain in the net 🙂
Well done on making the switch successfully. You’ll have a lot of fun tweaking WordPress.
Well done! It looks beautiful 🙂