Until now, that is. A short quiet spell has enabled me to get back on it, and although there are still finishing touches to be done, screenshots to be taken, projects to be added, at last I can make this new site live and consign the old – and very out of date – one to the great recycling bin in the sky.

The main thing I’m looking forward to with this new site is having my blog back online, but for the purposes of attracting new business I’m also looking forward to having recent work up on here and keeping it up to date. I’ve created a projects section to hold all that, and I’m hoping that at last potential new clients will not be put off by the very few examples of work I had on here before. Though, of course, right now there are even fewer.

One problem I have had already was in importing my Blogger posts and comments to this site. WordPress comes with an “import” function that supposedly imports from a lot of different blogging engines and CMSes, but I found that it didn’t work for me.

What I tried to do was import directly from my Blogger account, but WordPress kept getting stuck showing one post and one comment imported, although those posts never actually made it to WordPress. So, after reading a couple of posts on the WordPress support forums, I signed up for a WordPress.com account. Then, using the import tool on that account, I successfully imported everything from Blogger. With me so far?

Next, I used the “export” tool from that WordPress account, exporting a WordPress XML file with everything in it. It was this I tried to import to my this site. I say “tried”, because that didn’t work either. There was a problem with the permissions on my server forbidding WordPress from creating the folder where the XML file would be stored.

A bit of Googling later, and I saw that this is a known WP bug. The temporary fix was to CHMOD the uploads folder to 777 – meaning that anyone has read, write and execute permissions in that folder. Right, so that done, at last I successfully imported all my posts and comments, not forgetting to reset the permissions on the upload folder.

And here we are.