It started off innocently enough.

“You know, Kristy,” she said, “You could host your own blog on its own domain.  Wordpress is really cool, and it would only take a little tweaking.”

The wheels started spinning in my head.  I know she probably meant it would only take a little tweaking on her part.  But, I figured, why not get my hands a bit dirty?

Step 1: Install Wordpress.  Easy Enough. Done.

Hey, this isn’t so bad.

Step 2: Tweak the skin.

So I don’t know CSS.  So, I don’t know wordpress’ template tags.  Hell, I don’t really know much, but, c’mon…I used to be technical.  I can do this! I will do this!

Hours later — far more than I care to admit — I’d made decent progress hacking my way through the jungle that is wordpress and CSS, but I just couldn’t figure one last thing out.  I pinged on Julie (thank goodness for IM), showed her my progress (”OH. MY. GOD. You Rock!” was her response), and asked her for a hint.  Graciously, she gave me a hint, and I went off trying to solve my puzzle.  A few more hours (again, more than I care to admit) later, I gave up for the evening, utterly spent.

Bright and early the next morning, I was back at it.  With my apologies to those who truly suffer from the disorder, my own tendency toward OCD was rearing its ugly head.  With an additional tool at my fingertips (Thanks again, Julie!), and a little more reasoning on my part, I finally figured it out.

Skin.  Done.  So what the “little tweaking” was really a major effort.  So what the “little tweaking” was really a massive time suck on my part.  So.  I got it done, dammit.

Step 3: Import from Blogger

“Well the good news is,” my mentor encouraged, “importing from Blogger is a snap.”

What she meant was, importing from old blogger is a snap.  Importing from Blogger Beta? Not so much.  A recalcitrant bitch, she is.  A day and a half of Google searches later (using Google, who owns Blogger, to wiggle myself out of the quagmire that is Blogger?  Now, that’s some Internet Irony), I found the answer.   Hot off the press — as in, literally posted the day I found it, the product of some enterprising individual’s time, and a self-described kludge, was to be my answer.  If only I could get through it.

So what I had to manually extract each month’s worth of archives.  So what I had to manually install an old version of WordPress on my server.  So what I had to upgrade the old version to the new version after I’d run the import.  So what I had to export the WordPress database.  So what the export only produced a 146k file on my Mac, truncating 9/10ths of the data I needed.  So what I spent hours trying to figure that problem out, only to find out I could do it on my PC with no problems at all.  So what, once I got the data extracted and went to run the import, the data included all sorts of duplicates that had to be manually corrected.  So what.  I got it done, dammit.

Now there’s the matter of categorization (yes, I’m going to manually categorize 500+ posts), and the matter of relinking (yes, I’m going to relink all blogger links to my new domain), and the matter of importing images.  These things?  C’mon, they only will take a little tweaking.  And the likelihood that I’m going to get down and dirty in the database, making raw data updates on my own?  Very, very high.  And I might even do it without backing the database up!

This stuff?  I love it.  It’s been years since I’ve worked in a strictly technical capacity, but it’s nice to know I still have it.  Sort of.