Hello world, again (Part II, how I moved from JRoller to Wordpress)

This is my summary about the migration of my blog from JRoller to here.

I’m a Java engineer working in China. So when I was looking for a free blogging service, JRoller was my natural choice, because

1. In China, Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, and all other mainstream blogging sites are blocked. So there are sadly not many choices left for me.

2. Chinese local blogging sites are crap, specially from a developer’s perspective.

3. JRoller is the best free blogging service implemented in Java today. It’s hosted by JavaLobby which is one of my favorites. There are a lot of brilliant folks hosting their blogs there. And since it’s not so mainstream, it’s not blocked in China. Hurray!

But after more than 3 months living with JRoller, I have to say I’m an unhappy user. Roller’s (JRoller’s, actually) lack of attractive features and looks, defective Chinese support, mysterious API support, make it fairly uncompetitive compared to today’s top ones, and make my blogging experience rather unexciting.

So I decided to move to Wordpress, setting up on a server space I’m sharing with my friend, to get rid of all the problems. And I have to say Wordpress is simply great.

So I did some Google search about the migration of my posts from JRoller to Wordpress. I found a post from zeusville very helpful. And Jesus Rodriguez, the blogger, was kind enough to send me the custom JRoller template file which I wasn’t able to download from his blog anymore. Thanks again, Jesus.

Now I’m already very comfortable with Wordpress. BTW. This post is written with Windows Live Writer. I have to say that this is the best free offline blogging software I’ve used so far. Unfortunately it comes from Microsoft so it only runs on Windows. But maybe it’ll have a chance running on Mono on Linux. I’ll give it a try later.