Moved from Windows Live Spaces to WordPress
After debating for months on moving from Windows Live Spaces to my own WordPress hosted blog, I’ve finally made the jump. The biggest reason was that I couldn’t get the flexibility out of Spaces that I wanted, in particular, page customization. I hated having a blog that looked so cookie cutter.
Since Spaces’ RSS feed only gives me the last 30 posts in my blog, I had a heck of a time migrating my content. Cem tried helping me out by writing a perl script to crawl my Space and save each blog post’s page locally. However, I abandoned the hopes of automating this after realizing (a) there was a decent amount of post-processing that would need to be done on crawled pages and (b) that my perl is extremely rusty 
I ended up using the built-in RSS import of WordPress to get my last 30 posts, then cherry-picked the most popular blog posts to move over based on stats and comments. It’s a shame that I’ve couldn’t migrate any of the comments over, but hey, I guess it’s better than nothing.
I always knew that WordPress was extremely powerful, but in the last few days, I’m really beginning to appreciate how much you can really do with it. I love the widgets support, as well as all the freely avalaible themes there are out there. I went through about 15 themes before I settled on the Yaletown theme that I’m currently using. Ironically, the creator of this theme lives in my hometown and the shot he’s using for the banner is a picture of where my parent’s currently live. Talk about a perfect fit!
I’ve been mucking with customization of my blog to add more widgets and such, but there is still a long way to go. Here’s my to-do list for the next week or so when I can find the time after work:
- Go through my migrated blog posts and update the URLs from spaces.live.com to local urls
- Add a “top posts” widget
- Integrate google adsense
- Change the stock banner shot to one of my own photos. I already have a few shortlisted that I think will work
- Get rid of categories in favor of a tag cloud.
Goodbye Spaces, hello WordPress!
It’s fairly extensible too — let me know if you need help.
fil
5 Feb 07 at 6:59 pm
Freak! I got umped off the blogroll!
Tony
7 Feb 07 at 8:09 am
Tony, didn’t mean to drop you off. What is your new blog URL?
Trevin
7 Feb 07 at 1:18 pm
Lol.. I know, I was just teasing.
You’ve got some nice pictures going dude. Kudos. This design is not bad, too.
Tony
7 Feb 07 at 6:34 pm
I have officially added you’re “one minute blog” to my blogroll. I have to help represent SFU on here
Trevin
7 Feb 07 at 6:39 pm
[...] far I’m loving wordpress and my move from Windows Live Spaces has been a great choice. WordPress has done a phenomenable job in [...]
tee dot » The beauty of tags…
7 Feb 07 at 10:40 pm
[...] trevinchow.com, and made it my “new” personal email address along with hosting my own wordpress blog. To make things easier on myself, I ended up forwarding all emails to my yahoo.com account as I [...]
Migrated from Yahoo Mail to GMail
14 May 07 at 9:15 pm
[...] back in the day for building web services. The last time I got my hands really dirty was when I migrated away from Windows Live Spaces to a self-hosted wordpress blog. I had to muck around with customizing wordpress and writing a [...]
Reminder why I’m not a developer
31 Aug 07 at 10:57 pm
I think wordpress the best blog engine ever! Congratulations
Tiesto
20 Feb 08 at 6:11 am
Do you run wp-cache in WordPress? Or even better, does it come as standard with the lastest WordPress version? This is pretty essential to handle traffic spikes.
Photo Dev Guy
30 Aug 08 at 3:26 am
Wordpress is great, It is my favorite CMS and good luck with the swtich.
Matt Serwin
10 Sep 08 at 10:53 am
Out of all the CMS’s I have to say that wordpress is the ultimate. Not just for it’s user friendliness, but for SEO purposes it’s top dog. The plugins you can get for it are endless.
Chris@Windows Hosting
15 Sep 08 at 6:37 am
Wordpress rocks.. Very nice..
Nate
14 Nov 08 at 5:27 pm
wordpress is by far the best there is. i hope everything goes well
ryan connors
14 Nov 08 at 10:02 pm
Wordpress is much better than live space much more control lots of nice plugins
Stuartc
23 Dec 08 at 2:45 am
Wordpress is by FAR the best (user interface, setup, plugins, addons etc). I’m with you on this one!
Alex 'Forex Trading' Miller
19 Jan 09 at 9:13 am
I like that you think. Thank you for share very much.
KINGRPG
2 Feb 10 at 1:43 pm
Absolutely wonderful. Thanks for sharing this.
rod88.com
4 Feb 10 at 12:54 pm
You definitely made the right choice. WordPress is by far the superior engine. I use it for mine too.
hngatino
14 Feb 10 at 12:21 am
-Great article, it answered several questions I’ve had for a while. I bookmarked your site, and I hope you keep up the good work
furnitureindonesia
30 Mar 10 at 6:53 am
-Thanks you for all of the great updates!
Furniture Indonesia
23 Apr 10 at 7:59 am
-Thanks you for all of the great updates!
Furniture Indonesia
23 Apr 10 at 7:59 am
Immer wieder taucht die Frage auf, wie sich SSI in WordPress einbinden läßt ohne sich großartig z.B. in die PHP-Programmierung einarbeiten zu müssen
AWMPortal
29 Apr 10 at 4:11 pm
Yes i also like wordpress and blogger.
Good tips.
company logo design
18 May 10 at 9:42 am
I think wordpress the best blog engine ever!
vox
6 Jun 10 at 6:10 pm
WordPress will rule soon
Online web hosting
2 Jul 10 at 5:39 pm