Back in 2005 when I began this blog I stumbled upon a publishing tool that I felt worked good at the time. The tool was Blogger’s FTP Publishing Service. What I liked about the service was that I was able to host my blog on my own server while still using Blogger to create and manage content. Without getting too technical, let’s just say that with every post I created or change I made Blogger would upload the affected or new pages to my server.

Times change. In the 4+ years that I have been blogging many things have changed with Blogger but I continued to use the old FTP service. Over the past couple of years though I have known that I would eventually need to migrate to another blogging platform, but kept putting it off.

That all changed last month when I received notification from Blogger that they would be soon discontinuing their FTP service. I knew that the time to change had arrived. Thankfully I met Sawyer Pangborn last year at a Photowalking Utah event and he had told me that if I ever wanted to switch to WordPress, he would be happy to help.

I told Sawyer that my main goal was to move the blog to a WordPress installation installed on my server but have it appear seamless to the readers. And since my template had been severely changed from its original appearance over the years, I thought this would be tough for him to do. To give an idea about the years of changes, here’s a peek at what it looked like four years ago:

Sawyer performed the migration last Friday and I have to say that I am blown away at how seamless the transition was. Not only did he create from scratch a new template for me that is nearly identical (and with a few much needed changes) to the original, he moved all of my 1,200+ posts and 2,400+ comments over to the new platform. And he did all of this in just a few hours.

The top image in today’s post shows the new template overtop of the old template. He did exactly what I asked in maintaining the simple look and feel of the site.

There have been a couple of hiccups that needed addressing, but I have to saw that I am extremely grateful to Sawyer for his incredible WordPress know-how and his willingness to help. I now have my blog completely managed from within my own server and am ready to move forward into the future with a platform I can grow with.

To check out Sawyer’s work, you can visit his website at Anesti.org or follow him on Twitter at @spangborn.

Thanks again, Sawyer!