I’ve had my blog on google powered blogger for over 8 years now. I first post on blogger was on April Fools day 2003!! That’s a full 8 years ago, my blog is probably older than some of it’s readers. All 8 of them…

I enjoyed my time with Blogger, and this project  to move everything to keithrozario.com was not due to unhappiness with blogger, but rather trying to move things to the next level.

So how do you get the 200+ post from you blogger blog all the way to you ’new and improved’  wordpress powered blog that you host on your own?

Ever got up in the morning and wished you could blog in Tangerine, or felt like only Special Elite could fully express your creative juices. How about: syncopate!!

Wordpress is the best blogging platform out there. It’s the best blogging platform ever. It’s great, but there is one downside. It’s SLOOOOW. How Slow, depending on what you post up. People are a lot more forgiving on a PC, but if you’re surfing on EDGE through your mobile phone, or browsing on a slow connection, it’s very very slow. Painfully slow.

There is a great solution though

The one thing I hated in Composito (my wordpress theme) was the ugly looking comment box. Thankfully however, I found this great plugin called Disqus.

So with the latest that the Malaysian government hopes to spend upwards of USD15 million to give every single Malaysian above 18 years of age an email address, I just noticed I have no email address @keithrozario.com

Unfortunately, Nearlyfreespeech.net (my web host) does not provide a email like other webhost do. If you’ve got your website hosted on goDaddy, Dreamhost or bluehost, you’ll have in built email functionality. If you’re with Nearlyfreespeech, you’re on your own (which is why they’re cheap).

That being said, Google also offers free email service for your own domain and it’s much better than whatever offered by GoDaddy or Dramhost. So no matter where you host your domain, I advise you use Google Apps to host your email. Here’s a quick and dirty tutorial on how to setup your Email on Google apps, and have Google host your domains email for FREE!!

Analytics are those little bits of code that allow you to track vital statistics of your blog. Things like:

1. How many people visited my blog
2. Where did they visit from
3. Which country are they from
4. How long did they read my blog
5. What’s my most viewed post?

You can always tell the difference between a ‘standard’ blog that’s hosted off blogger or wordpress and one that looks professional. Obviously the first thing that comes to mind is the themes. If you’ve got a theme at least your blog would look a bit different, if you’ve got a premium theme (one that you bought for either 20-100 dollars), then chances are none of your visitors have seen the theme before and your blog would look a whole lot more individualistic.

I gave myself a 100 dollar budget for this blog and currently I’ve got 80 more dollars to spare. That’s not bad, considering I spent 20% of the budget and already have a good looking blog. Even though the budget permitted, I’d thought I’d save a bit of cash on the theme and just get a free one. There are some others things you can do to make your blog look a bit more professional though:

Installing wordpress was a breeze. In fact installing wordpress was so easy I was just awestruck by it’s simplicity. Wordpress ROCKS!

Installing themes was also relatively straightforward. Some themes worked seamlessly, others took some tweaking but overall with a little html/css knowledge you’ll get the hang of it. However I had to install some custom widgets to make my site look a bit more presentable.

I installed ‘Social Media Widget’ and

I tried a couple of web designs but this one seems the best fit for me…so far :)