The reason is blogger.com blocked by Chinese government, so I can’t login to update my blog. Although I have my own domain, I even can’t visit my blog because some ghs servers of Google are blocked too.

After a long waiting, I can’t bear any more, finally decided to buy a hosting and transfer my blog to WordPress.
The following are some simple steps: (You should change peptop.com with your wanted domain)

Install WordPress 2.9.1

Because I have no Fantastico so I have to install WordPress manually, luckily it is not complex.

1. Login to my VPS via Putty with root role.
2. Download lastest WordPress vis following command:
   wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
3. unextract it to the right directory
   tar zxvf latest.tar.gz -C /home/wwwroot/peptop.com
4. Use a control panel or change config file to bind /home/wwwroot/peptop.com/wordpress to www.peptop.com
5. Use PhpMyAdmin to create a MySQL database.
6. Change the DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD settings in wp-config-sample.php and rename it to wp-config.php
7. Open http://www.peptop.com/wp-admin/install.php in browser, the installation will finish automatically.

Import blog from Blogger to WordPress

1. Login to new WordPress blog first.
2. Find “Tools” » “Import” in left menu panel.
3. Choose “Blogger”.
   The Blogger will verify your account and the WordPress will import your posts and comments automaticlly.

Adjust old posts and comments

After migration, you have to adjust some categories, edit some posts to fit on the new theme.
If you are brave, you can use PhpMyAdmin open the database and set comments’ parentid fields, with this, the old posts can have threaded comments effect like the following image:

Conclusion

Migration from Blogger to WordPress is not that difficult, but in the end it took me several hours to transfer and cost me several dollas for self-hosting. Because the Chinese government blocked almost every free BSP, I will always pay for my blog hosting in future.

“Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in – to prevent them from leaving us.“, said John F. Kennedy under the Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Wall has collapsed for more than 20 years, but the evil Chinese government is building a new wall on the internet, isn’t it?

Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Blog.com, LiveJournal.com, Xanga.com, none of them were options for me.
Not that their services were bad (they all provide nice services), but they were blocked by Chinese government or on the way to be blocked.
If you don’t know how and why the evil government does that, please referral this Wiki page.

Well, finally I came to the free world, and have to make the sweet choice.

Blogger, WordPress or hosting Blog on my own server?
After some searching and attempts, I want to share some experience to you.

Blogger.com

Blogger is serviced by Google, the biggest internet company.

Advantages:

• Really easy to use, especially to beginners.
• Needn’t extra search engine optimization, the robots.txt and sitemap is auto-generated.
• Friendly to Google, it only takes 6 minutes for Google to include and index my new Blog post.
• You can easily add adsense on your Blog and make a few cents.

Disadvantages:

• Can’t create categories, that means you can only organize your content by labels.
• Not enough plugins, although many features can be hacked, such as related post, but almost all hacks are depended on AJAX, which is not friendly to search engine.
• Some annoying bugs, I wasted several hours when I was creating this Blog in Blogger.com. I will write another post to explain it detailly.

WordPress.com

WordPress is known as its famous open source php blogging software.

Advantages:

• Categories, you can create categories and organize your content by sub-topics, tags. Related posts are not generated by javascript, so it’s better to search engine than Blogger’s.
• Ping, in WordPress, you can ping many Blog directories.
• Integrated stats system, with Blogger, you must sign up a Google analytics or any other third party tracker scripts and install it manually.

Disadvantages:

• Free users can’t add their own domain names, you must upgrade to premium user first, however, this feature is free in Blogger.
• Themes and style, although WordPress’s themes are more beautiful than Blogger’s, you cannot create your own theme, you have to pay first, then you can edit the CSS.

How about installing WordPress on your own server?

If you are familiar with PHP and MySql, it’s a great idea. You can modify the source codes, install or create any plugins you want.
But if you are not a technical man, I suggest you choosing a BSP.

My counsel is you’d better have your own domain name even if you are using a free Blog service.
If one day you feel tired of your BSP, you can choose another one or host Blog yourself.
The good news is, you needn’t change your Blog URL, won’t lose your site’s page rank and your readers, the most important people.