I imagined that swapping from Blogger to WordPress would be a bit of a wrench – having to leave a nice blog behind and basically start afresh.  Whilst I was investigating the possibility of swapping all the posts and comments by hand, I realised that the latest version of WordPress has a "Blogger Import" facility.  Excellent!

Once I had found this, it took me only a few moments to decide to change over – reason being that Blogger is quite often unavailable, and simply "hangs" when making posts.  I was unable to post for 4 days!

A new domain & hosting
I registered my domain (osworld.biz) for 2 years and bought some hosting.  That took all of 10 minutes – next up I had to wait for DNS to propogate.  This took about 1 hour.  I then looked at installing WordPress – I have done this once before but not in a long time.  I created the database to use and uploaded the file.  It basically then installed itself.

The Blogger Import
Then I imported my Blogger.  This is quite simple, you give your blogger username and password then click "import".  WP then changes some settings in your blogger blog and imports everything.  It's not perfect!  Because my Blogger was quite big (350 posts + over 1000 comments) this took quite some time and caused the import to hang on at least 5 occasions – meaning I had to restart it each time.  This was a real PITA as there are no error messages…

Problems, problems
I eventually managed to get everything imported with some problems => a couple of months worth of posts had been imported twice.  So I have to delete these out one by one.  I have not yet found a way to delete lots of posts in one go.  Anyone know how to do this?

In addition, Blogger does not use "categories" so all posts go directly into the "uncategorized" category.  I need to spend some time to sort out posts into their own categories – again, does anyone know how to do multiple sorting (instead of 1 at a time)?

A new theme
Of course, the look of a WP is not that nice, so I spent some time this morning going around the links that you guys gave me (thanks to all!), and found this theme which is quite nice and simple (like me ).  Details of the theme are at the bottom of the page.  I spent a few moments changing a few things in the theme, and I will do some more later (including the whole colour scheme [ I like green ]).  I am most pleased with the layout, and can already see that WP is much more flexible than Blogger.

Summary
I should have changed to WP ages ago.  It's pretty simple to do, and I can see some good possibilities that are not available in Blogger…