Today has just been schitty with respect to blogs. Being the brilliant guy I am, I decided that it might be time for the Sporting Gnomes to get a more permanent, more dedicated hosting environment. What. An. Idiot. I. Am.!
First problem: getting the right FTP settings.
Second problem: getting the FTP settings right.
Third problem: Realizing that problems 1 and 2 are different. Fixing problem 1 leads directly to fixing problem 2, which leads to loss of ownership of the original blogspot address. Sort of.
Fourth problem: The old address is “released”, which apparently means that it just sits there for no one to claim. Thus the advice about immediately reclaiming the address is as useless as school bus in New Orleans during a hurricane.
Fifth problem: Even if the FTP settings are correct, getting the entire blog published takes a “few minutes” and by “minutes” they mean excruciatingly long hours. (In Blogger’s defense, my host sucks nuts when it comes to FTP, so part of the problem may lay with ipowerweb.)
Sixth problem: Firefox doesn’t like blogger. The excruciatingly slow pace of file transfer seems to be due in no-small-part to some type of memory leak in firefox which causes it to claim every available byte of random access memory. My 3.06 GHz laptop with 512 mb RAM was simply incapable of keeping up. My something-something athlon desktop (thanks Brad) had about 850 megs of its 1 gig of RAM consumed by firefox running the file transfer script. If you’re keeping score at home, the google backed blogger program works significantly better with internet explorer than firefox. Go figure!
Anyway, I now have 94% of the files published. Yippee. Now with luck I can get the blogspot address back, and then somehow manage to figure out how to convert all this blogger crap to wordpress. And for those of you with technical prowess and know-how who are asking why I didn’t use the wordpress importer to import everything, I have an answer. It doesn’t work for shit either.
Hey. If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Blogger, my blog host, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here, with a big ribbon on his head, and I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is. Hallelujah. Holy shit. Where’s the Tylenol?
I know you know of this link already
But still, Tom’s post should be helpful.
Thanks for the link. I certainly ignored it previously.
Although it won’t work so well if the wordpress import functions continues to not function.
The problem seems to be mostly resolved. I’m completely inclined to believe it is a blogger problem.
Figuring that it might be my host, I started a wordpress.com blog so that I could try to import from blogger that way. Well after about 10 or 15 false starts it finally imported all the old posts. After that worked, the new blog on my own servers was also able to import all the old posts.
Down with Blogger!