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Of Blogrolls and Widgets
By Wolfie | January 4, 2008
Part of “Going self-hosted with Wordpress : A Wolfie Guide” [PDF]
I realised that there were a couple of major elements that I didn’t cover in my recent post about going self-hosted with Wordpress. Those were importing your Blogroll and which Widgets you can have as standard and which ones you’ll have to hunt for. These two items, plus what I covered in To self-host or not… should then put your blog back into the same state that it was when it was hosted at Wordpress.com.
So, Blogroll. You’ve probably got loads of links in yours - I certainly had quite a number in mine when I decided to transfer - but they don’t get exported with everything else when you create your export XML file. Not sure why, but the way they’re managed in the dashboard probably has something to do with it.
At the time that I transferred this blog, I didn’t know that you could export them; I could see an “Import” button in the Blogroll dashboard, but not an “Export” one. So I moved all mine by hand, one by one. I decided to dump a few of them during this process, so it did allow me to do a bit of spring-cleaning that I perhaps might not have done, but it was a slow tedious process. But you don’t need to go through that process; there is a quicker, easier way - it’s just not obvious.
The “Import” function requires an OPML file. Apparently this stands for Outline Processor Markup Language; what that means I have no idea, but it’s a file type related to XML (what you used to export all your posts) which, as I understand it, should be understood by pretty much any system going. So how do you get your Blogroll into an OPML format?
Well, you don’t really need to if you’re importing from a Wordpress.com blog. Go to Blogroll in the dashboard of your self-hosted blog and click “Import”. Here you’re presented with two boxes - one asking for an Internet address or one offering the opportunity to upload a file from your local machine. You want the first one.
In this box type the URL of your Wordpress.com blog, followed by “/wp-links-opml.php” (so it would look like this: http://yourusername.wordpress.com/wp-links.opml.php). Before you click “Import OPML File” a word of caution; if you have your links in categories (like I have Wolfs Links and Wolfs Reading”), you will have to re-assign the categories once you’ve done the import; the import process will not recognise them. Now go ahead and click the button; you’ll get a screen that will tell you which links have been imported and you can then manage them in the usual way.
So that’s your Blogroll done. Now onto widgets.
Widgets, as we know, can be immensely useful and we’ve all got quite a few on our blogs, I’m sure - even if we’ve just stuck with the default ones that come with our theme. If widgets are not something you use, you’ve got nothing to worry about, otherwise there’s some information that you might find useful.
Not all of the Wordpress.com standard widgets are available with Wordpress.org. Well, that’s not quite true. They are available (probably), but they’re not available as standard. “Top Posts”, for example, is not available as standard, nor is “Blog Stats” and while you can have a “Tag Cloud” you can’t have a “Category Cloud”. If any of these (or things like Flickr and Sonific) are important to you, be aware that you will have to go looking for them on the Wordpress.org site, download them and (using FTP) install them yourself. It’s not that difficult a process, but can be daunting for a new user.
Well, that covers importing your Blogroll and gives you a heads-up on the widget front. Your blog should now be at a stage where you’re happy enough for readers to come calling. Everything else is really just tweaking and in upcoming articles I’ll try and cover subjects like:
Where are my Wordpress stats?
How do I install new widgets?
What’s all this about editing my theme?
I’m really on a journey of discovery as far as self-hosting is concerned and am learning to do these things as I go along. These are the issues that I’m finding are relatively easy to do once you know how, but finding out how can sometimes be tricky.
Tags: Wordpress, Self-hosted
Categories: Blogging |
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:: The New Wolfs Howl » Blog Archive » Plug-ins for Wordpress.org had this to say:
[...] blog to a self-hosted Wordpress.org installation, including uploading a theme, and about the blogroll and widgets. Those two posts, hopefully, got you started and your blog looks pretty much how you want it [...]
7:25 pm :: February 7th, 2008:: washwords had this to say:
O M G. Thank you!!!! I was about to spend hours trying to do this. You’re right I need to do some spring cleaning for sure but thank you thank you thank you and thank you onecoolsite for pointing me here!
washwords’s most recent blog post: test post
5:00 am :: July 24th, 2008:: Milestone | The New Wolfs Howl had this to say:
[...] before you take the plunge. Other posts in the series - including XML File Is Too Big To Import and Of Blogrolls And Widgets - are also very popular, leading me to think that perhaps I should concentrate on tech blogging. [...]
9:38 pm :: August 15th, 2008