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A few of my friends asked me what RSS was when they saw my FeedBurner chicklet at the top right-hand corner on a few of my websites. I’m sure that most of you have come across it yourself on other websites. You’ve probably even heard or seen “RSS Feeds” being mentioned a lot in the online publishing world and/or blogging community (i.e. TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.).

So what is RSS? What’s so important about it? Do you need it?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and to simply put, it’s just another way for publishers to deliver/syndicate/distribute content. An “RSS feed” refers to the content being delivered, and is not commonly viewable on web browsers as it produces different code i.e. XML instead of HTML.

In part one, I discussed about the requirements and things you need to consider before taking the plunge. If you’ve pretty much got the general idea and are ready to go ahead, let’s move on.

I have broken down the whole process into six stages:

1. Preparing your web host and database
2. Downloading, configuring and uploading WordPress
3. Exporting all your comments from Haloscan and uploading them
4. Importing from Blogger
5. Importing from Haloscan
6. Tidying up

Don’t worry if anything from the above scares you. I will go through each stage in detail below:

I recently migrated one of my blogs from Blogger, along with all my comments from Haloscan, to WordPress 2.0. It took me a couple of days of research before finally understanding what was needed to accomplish this. Once everything was already in place, it only took a few minutes to move everything across.

WordPress itself is extremely easy to install. If you don’t believe me, have a look at their Famous 5-Minute Install page.

I came across a very very short (only two paragraphs) review on 1&1 (or 1and1) web hosting while I was checking out the Acronym Replacer plugin for Wordpress.

The first time I came across 1&1 was a few years back (circa 2000-2003) when one of their flyers fell off a computer magazine I was reading. At the time, I had a website hosted on SupaNames (which I just had moved over from GetDotted). Prior to those two web host providers, I was using various free web hosts at the time such as Geocities, FortuneCity, Tripod, etc.

After 2 minutes of browsing through their website, I found two things that immediately put me off:

1. No payment via PayPal

I sold a TFT on eBay last night. An old 15-inch Samsung I bought  almost 3 years ago. I always start my auctions very very low; a measly 99p.  Why? Because it’s a sure-fire way of getting a lot of people’s attention.  It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but enough for me to continue this trend of auction-listing.

The TFT weighed in 7.5kg including the cables, manuals and box.  Royal Mail charges £18.50 for Next Day Special Delivery. Bloody expensive.  But the £500 compensation gives me a peace of mind should it ever get damaged whilest in their possession. I shopped around.  The next cheapest option would be with Parcel Force 48 at £17.35 with £200 compensation.  Just over a pound in difference and what, you have to wait a whole day?  Oh well, a pound is a pound, so I stuck the 2nd option in my listing.