Blogger on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Moving This Blog From WordPress to Hugo

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I moved this blog from WordPress to a Hugo static site, and the real work was not converting the posts but keeping every inbound link since 2008 working.

WordPress.com 404 With Blogger Permalinks

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:02:52 +0000

Part of the research I did before migrating from Blogger to WordPress.com, was to make sure that current Blogger permalinks would resolve correctly once the old posts were imported into WordPress.com. At the time all seemed fine, but soon after migrating, I received alerts from Google Webmaster Tools that there is an increase in site errors, specifically 404 errors.

Some background: Permalinks are the URL’s that point directly to specific posts on the blog. These URL’s are known by search engines, are shared on forums, and are basically the static address of posts. Blogger and WordPress.com use different styles of permalinks. WordPress.com allows some customization of permalinks, but unlike WordPress.org, there is no support for custom plugins to handle rewrites for permalinks, 302’s or 404’s.

From Blogger to WordPress

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:48:58 +0000

I outlined my concerns with Blogger in my last post, and after much deliberation, I decided to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress.

There are two main choices; use WordPress.com for full service blog hosting, or use WordPress.org and host the WordPress application at a hosting provider. Here is a summary describing the differences.

I decided to try both options; I created a blog at WordPress.com, and I created a self-hosted blog using WordPress.org.

Creating the blog at WordPress.com was very quick and easy.

Looks can be deceiving

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:28:00 +0000

It has been almost two weeks since I switched to using Blogger’s new dynamic template.

Browsing the site with the new template works really well; it uses most of the available browser real estate, it looks good on an iPad, it feels nice and fluid, but it also has problems.

For some reason my AdSense integration stopped working, and the AdSense site said my account needs to be verified. AdSense was working fine in the old template, so something in the new template, or switching to the new template, must have triggered this. I’ve had AdSense for almost a year, and in that time I’ve not even made enough for Google to trigger a payment. In order to verify my account, I had to enter a PIN they mailed me on a postcard, enter the amount of a test transfer in my bank account, and enter a PIN read to me on my phone. Two days after the verification steps were completed ads started showing up again.

Blogger Dynamic Templates

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 06:17:00 +0000

I just switched to the Blogger Dynamic Template.
You can read about what it offers readers here, and what Blogger wrote about it here.

I am still on the fence about keeping it, or switching back to my old custom template, or adopting one of the standard templates.

It is much easier using standard Blogger templates vs. using custom templates; the template designer keeps up with new Blogger features, or Blogger changes. With custom templates there is always manual CSS and HTML editing involved.