I’m sure many of you will have heard the massive news at Techcrunch Disrupt today, but to quickly summarise, Windows Live (formerly MSN) Spaces is shutting down and migrating their 30m+ users to WordPress.com. Without a doubt this will present a number of challenges for bloggers coming across to WP, so to make the process easier for any of you starting the migration process, hopefully this guide will serve as an introduction to the features within WordPress, and their old equivalent function with Windows Live spaces, that you will already be familiar with.
Blog List is now Links
Some of you may have a collection of links to friends, family and useful websites, tucked away in your blog list, or ‘blog roll’ as some know it. WordPress offers this exact functionality in the form of ‘Links’ which can be access in your side bar. Previously, you were limited to a one dimensional list of links, which could be categorised, but thanks to the super awesome power of WordPress, you can now categorise these in a much more logical fashion, with parent and child relationships.
Blog List in MSN Spaces is now 'Links'
To add a new link in WordPress, simply click (yep you’ve guessed it) Add New. Select a category, a description (if your theme supports it), a target (the window to open the link in), and how you are related to that link (WordPress has awesome support for Microformats). This will give search engines such as Google a much richer understanding of how and why you are linking to the website in question, which is good for the web, and good news for bloggers.
Categories, and relationships will now give you more flexibility.
Archives & Categories
Blog archives in MSN spaces worked on a rolling road. In other words, regardless of whether or not you were blogging for a particular month or not, a link appeared for that month. This was a particular pain with Spaces, as it meant that there were massive gaps in your navigation if you went on holiday for a month or just so happened not to have that many updates. Fear not meticulous MSN’ers! WordPress has catered for archives in a much sexier way, only show month on month of archives for months which have updates, saving you the embarrassment of empty months, which result in a poor user experience.
Not only that, but just like spaces can you choose to list posts by ‘Categories’ as well, allowing you to group your posts by topic, which in many cases, makes a whole load more sense.
Adding a category in MSN spaces
Normally, you will be used to adding categories when you think of a new one, and directly when you are adding a new blog entry. WordPress mirrors that functionality, but goes one step better, and allows you to specify parent -> child relationships for categories all from within the admin dashboard. Want a parent category on ‘Blogging’ with a sub category of ‘WordPress’ ? No problem. You can of course migrate all of your existing categories across to WordPress, but you may find that now you wish to sort them better, or break them down into further logical sections, a more granular categories page also allows you to manage all of you categories in one place, and add even more meta data to them should your theme support it.
Wordpress category selection allows parent > child relationships
The below screenshot shows the bulk edit screen for categories, which you may want to take advantage of when you first migrate your blog across from Windows Live Spaces. This will allow you to setup the initial categories, including any child level categories that you may have. At the outset you may find this quicker and easier to use than the right hand panel which sits alongside the post edit screen.
A complete granular management page for categories exists via the link on the lhs of your new blog.
Writing a Post
If you’ve been writing blog material in the web based interface on MSN spaces for any length of time, you’ll have become accustomed to its nuances such as lack of cross support (it currently forces you to type HTML tags in anything other than Internet Explorer – nasty), and that to get any kind of experience, you’ll probably have already bitten the bullet and downloaded one of the many client side blogging applications available which are supported. WordPress on the other hand, is simply a joy to blog with, (although it too is supported in Live Writer if you are wondering). You get a well supported rich text editor, in the form of tinyMCE, which supports a myriad of formatting text, without adding superfluous and invalid HTML tags, which in some browsers have caused many a headache for Windows Spaces users.
Everything & the Kitchen Sink
1) Uploading Images
Previously, you will be used to uploading images up to 50MB. WordPress currently supports 3 gigabytes of file storage (that’s about 2,500 pictures!) on their free account, but only allows you to upload up to 16MB in one sitting. Really, that should be ample for everyone, as images on the web shouldn’t really exceed a couple of kb anyway to keep the user experience speedy. Windows Live Spaces allows you to select two presets for image sizes (Large 1600px, and Medium 600px ) , however WordPress is alot more flexible.
Image sizes can be adjusted on the fly via a web based image resizing tool, and the aspect ratio of your image is maintained. This sure as hell beats having to open up photoshop for every image that you want to add to your blog.
Wordpress Image resizing is beautifully flexible
2) Adding Video
Video content on MSN Live spaces previously involved the arduous process of throwing something up on YouTube first, copying the embed code, and returning to your blog post to add it. WordPress is much more integrated than that, allowing you to both embed directly uploaded files, AND showcase YouTube videos via embed tags or shortcodes. The below video shows exactly how to do that.
MSN spaces video support was pretty poor
WordPress supports a number of video platforms out of the box, making it easier to get your content onto the web.
3) Adding Audio
A dedicated page for upload audio is provided within the WordPress admin, allowing you to add MP3 files to your site. To do this, switch to the HTML view when creating/editing a post or page and enter the dedicated shortcode, which looks like this: [audio ], with the address inside. For example:
[audio http://www.webdistortion.com/my.mp3]
This will produce a dedicated audio player out of the box. For hosted blogs which are migrating across, you will have to purchase a Space upgrade to upload files directly onto your server, but the above hack will get around that limitation, providing you can find somewhere else to host your files. There are a number of locations around the web that will allow you to do so, and no end of online storage solutions which can host audio content. Further details on hosting audio on your blog can be found directly on the WordPress support site.
Wordpress supports audio content via "Shortcodes"
4) Adding Media
As well as the obvious video and images uploads, WordPress also supports a number of different media formats. These can range from slideshows, to galleries, to flash content, to embedded documents. There is no real limit to what you can now add to your blog as part of your content. If you can see it somewhere on a webpage on the web, you will be able to now embed it in your blog. With MSN spaces stripping a number of different embed, and object tags for security reasons, you’ll find that the curtains have been lifted on a much more powerful platform overall. More details on the media formats supported here.
Scheduling Posts
The post scheduler is a thing of beauty, and gives bloggers the ability to time a post perfectly. Windows Live currently only allows you to save a post as a draft, and return to it when you are ready to publish. Well, prepare for your socks to be popped folks – you can now specify the exact time and date you want your posts to go out onto the web all via a very simple calendar widget which is available at the top right hand side of your new blog. Click the Edit button beside publish immediately, and select a date and time to schedule your post.
Wordpress provides out of the box support for post scheduling.
Themes
Theme support within Windows Spaces remains very limited, with a couple of layout options, and theme colours available. Even the most creative use of the pallette left you with a space that often looked very similar to your friends blog. Thankfully, WordPress has an active community of designers and developers actively producing themes for WordPress on a daily basis. Yes, it really is that active. Just select ‘Appearance’ then ‘Themes’ to experience the magic and joy for yourself. For those of you technically enough minded, you can also now ammend the underlying stylesheet giving an additional level of control to the appearance of your blog.
Windows Spaces doesn't really have great theme support
WordPress offers a whole boatload of amazing themes, by respected designers all over the globe, and puts an extra layer of customisation back in the hands of the blog owner. It’s a breeze to setup, and will have you jumping for joy upon using it.
Wordpress has a multitude of new designs to play with! yay!
Widgets
Widgets are conceptually similar to ‘Modules’ within Windows Live spaces, but are more focused on the visitor experience than they are on additional extras. In other words, where Microsoft were trying to show off social profiles, and disk folders, WordPress have concentrated on showcasing your posts better. There is a drag and drop interface with Windows spaces, and the same is true with WordPress, although they are limited to the sidebar rather than the main body of the page.
That said, the difference between these two screenshots is night and day – and the WordPress screenshot doesn’t even contain the full hog. Click on ‘Appearance’ then Widgets to bring up the same interface, and then drag and drop those widgets that you want onto the sidebar. Note that your theme needs to be widget ready for this feature, but a good majority of the ones approved in the WP theme section (mentioned earlier) already are.
Modules and Widgets are conceptually similar, although WordPress offers a greater selection
A whole host of widgets are available to enhance your blog
Email / Call Blogging
Some people prefer to send posts to their blog via email, both WordPress and Windows Live Spaces support that feature, so that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone migrating across. Go to ‘Settings’ then ‘Writing’ to set it up. You’ll find a link to the Post by Email feature within this interface. Another additional extra that won’t have been available in Spaces – is ‘Post by Voice‘ – a great way to publish audio posts to your blog whilst out and about on the move.
Shiny New Bits
Tag Support
There are a number of new additions to the blogging experience for Live users. Firstly, there is tag support, allowing you to not only categorise, but add an additional layer of folksonomy to classify your content. This becomes more and more important as your blog grows and becomes more complex with more posts.
Shortcodes
Shortcodes are specially designed codes which perform functions from within themes, and the wordpress core when used. You can read about the currently supported shortcodes over here which will straight away make a difference to your blogging experience.
Mobile Support
WordPress.com offers a mobile version of your blog to visitors out of the box, meaning that mobile browser will be able to consume your content easier than ever before. This is of course, completely optional, and can be turned off if you so desire.
Windows Messenger Integration
When you connect your Messenger account to WordPress.com, you can have new posts on your WordPress.com blog automatically send a notification for each new blog post to your Messenger friends’ feeds. If you’ve already built up a community of followers who have added you on Windows Live Messenger, this is a great additional feature.
Great SEO
WordPress has a great architecture for search engines, and your new blog is likely to experience an uplift in traffic, all of which can now be monitored right from within your dashboard. Friendly URLs, well crafted themes, RSS and ping support have all helped to make content much more accessible to search engine robots.
Migration over to WordPress
The step by step guide provided for Windows Live Spaces account holders, is pretty straightforward, but if you cant find what you need, simply follow what I’ve done below, and enjoy.
Further Reading
The official post on WordPress.com from the WordPress Team welcoming Live Spaces Bloggers into the fold.
Ma.tt – the main man behind WordPress Matt Mullenweg on his thoughts about the announcement, (and future World domination of course)
TechCrunch post highlighting some of the reasons behind the decision by Microsoft.
The Windows Live Team blog post announcement on the partnership.
