How I converted from Blogger to WordPress
If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed this blog looks a bit different from the last time you were here. I converted it from Blogger to WordPress earlier today, and while it wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, it’s do-able.
If you’re wondering why I converted, it’s mostly because Blogger decided to drop support for it at the end of next week. You see, this blog has been in existence for four years now (although I don’t think you can technically say I’ve been doing this for four years because I’ve rarely posted for the past couple years). Anyway, when I originally set up my blog through Blogger, it didn’t really give a lot of options for how to set it up. I’ve been using updates via FTP, which Google says is really difficult to support. As such, they’ve decided to drop support for it and force you to migrate to another domain/site and redirect from your original to the new one. Sounds pretty complicated. Since I originally put this blog up on Blogger four years ago, I’ve discovered WordPress. Not to put too blunt a point on it, but WordPress beats Blogger hands down. No comparison. since I was being forced to upgrade anyway, I thought I may as well upgrade to something I liked.
Enough of the why. Here’s the how:
My particular scenario was as this – I had a choice of either being 1.) redirected from my old Blogger site (atleastihavechicken.com/whatiswillthinking) to a new Blogger site by Google or 2.) starting a new site and basically abandoning the old site. The solution I came up with allowed me to migrate my old Blogger site to a WordPress site at the same location, and keep the old permalinks. This last part was important to me, since there were a few sites that linked to a post from a long time ago that had gained some notoriety. I did not want to break those links.
There are a few steps to this, but the jist is to do the following:
- Set up a temporary Blogger blog to hold all your posts from the old one
- Set up a temporary WordPress blog to migrate your posts from the blog in step one – going directly from the old Blogger to a WordPress install DID NOT WORK. This is due to the import tool in WordPress not supporting the FTP updated Blogger blogs which caused this whole mess to begin with.
- Use the Blogger import tool to import posts from the original Blogger site to the new Blogger site.
- Use the WordPress import tool to import the new posts from the new Blogger site into WordPress.
- Make a copy of the uploaded_images directory on your original Blogger site. This is where all the images used in posts have been stored since you’ve had the blog. When doing the various exports and whatnots, all the images are still hotlinked to the uploaded_images directory on the original Blogger site. You need to get a copy of these images if you ever plan to have them viewable again.
- Set up the correct permalink structure on the temporary WordPress blog in step 2. It will look like this:
- Change the post titles in WordPress to match the goofy Blogger ones. Blogger omits the words “the” and “a” and has a maxlength that truncates the complete title
- Export the posts on the temporary WordPress site using Tools -> Export. This will get you to a point where you download a XML file that’s ready to be imported on the new permanent WordPress site that’s being installed in the same directory as your old Blogger site.
- Delete the old Blogger site.
- Install WordPress in the same directory as the old Blogger site
- Copy over the uploaded_images directory into the root of the new WordPress site, which should be the same as the old Blogger directory.
- Go forth and make your new WordPress site your own! Now would be an opportune time to do a happy dance.
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