Hours after explaining the reasons why I moved from Blogger to Wordpress, I’d like to share with you the steps I took to turn my vision into reality. My steps may be slightly different than yours for the singular reason I was (and still am) using the same domain for both blog publishing programs.
- My first step involved backing up my Blogger account. I routinely saved the XML template but never in 16 months had I backed up my posts and comments. I used the aptly-named Blogger Backup utility that runs on the Windows NET engine.
- The next step was to learn all I could learn about what other people did. Among my sources of information were:
- The Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress – MamaBlogga
- Convert from Blogger to Wordpress – Dusty Reagan
- Blogger Sucks. Wanna Move to Wordpress? – The Blog Herald
- How to Import a Blogspot Blog into Wordpress – Signs of our Times
- Moving from Blogger to Wordpress – Brad Linder
- It’s important to say here that I read all of the above links and many more. The reason is because most online guides assume the person is migrating from blogspot.com to wordpress.com, or blogspot.com to a Wordpress.com-hosted domain, or some other variant. Because I was going from Blogger to Wordpress with a common domain, I needed to take advice from many places and people.
- Once I had an idea what to do, I realized I didn’t want to duplicate what I did with Blogger and host my domain on the free Wordpress.com service. Wanting control of my blog (though my domain) and the ability to publish in the what-if scenario Wordpress.com was down, I reached out to Andy Quayle, owner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Tubu Internet Solutions, LLC for assistance in hosting my blog. Andy and his team offer blog hosting for the affordable price of $10 a year. You can get more information and sign-up yourself at bloghost.me.
- Andy not only set up my blog hosting account, but he also took the initiative and installed Wordpress for me. He’s one cool guy. And he came recommended from my friend Chris Brogan, via a recent blog post on 50 ways to take your blog to the next level.
- After receiving an email from Andy in near-record time (they’re a small company so can afford lightning-fast responses and amazing customer support) that the Wordpress installation was successful, I updated my domain’s DNS information to reflect Tubu’s nameservers. I use GoDaddy as my domain registrar and it replicated across the web fairly quickly.
- I logged onto Wordpress as an administrator and began importing Blogger posts and comments into my Wordpress account. That lasted about 20 minutes.
- My next task was to install FireFTP, a Firefox add-on file transfer tool. Because I was using an external blog host, I needed a simple way to streamline connections between my computer and my account.
- Realizing how Wordpress plugins work, I began installing, activating, and setting some of them up. As of this writing, I’m using five plugins to maintain Blogger permalinks; optimize title tags for search engines; display prior blog post titles in comments; a plugin to enable new commenters to subscribe to future comments; and the spam-fighting Akismet comment tool that is installed with Wordpress.
- Back in my Blogger dashboard, I continued to point ariwriter.blogspot.com to my domain, but switched off the drop boxes that asked if I wanted search engines to index the blog. I also edited my template html to remove applicable metatag and javascript codes. In many cases, I re-installed those codes in my new Wordpress theme (which I’d installed before installing the plugins).
- Parts of step 9 and much of step 10 are described in full and with screenshots at Blog Bloke’s complete guide for migrating and redirecting from Blogger to Wordpress. He also talks about the .htaccess file which is a subject that caused me the biggest obstacle of the entire experience.
- And that’s the final part I’m still trying to solve. I don’t have much experience with .htaccess, but because my old Blogger pages had the dot-html format and my new Wordpress pages look like, well, the above location bar that doesn’t have a dot-html format, I needed a way to create a 301 redirect from the html files to the non-html files. Currently, my .htaccess file includes:<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)\.html$ $1/$2/$3/ [QSA,R=301,L] </IfModule>
- I’m sure I’m missing something, because if I include the RedirectMatch line that Blog Bloke refers to in the above link and also change my Wordpress permalink notation to the custom solution he suggests, then the html files don’t redirect. But with the URLs to include the year and month notation, everything works. I’ll see what happens in the coming days and weeks.
That’s the nutshell. I’ll update this post as needed. Thoughts? Questions? Ideas?
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Hi Ari,
I am far from an expert when it comes to htaccess files but could there be a conflict between your htacess and the maintain blogger permalinks plugin? From a quick read of that plugin it seems like it’s creating a permalink structure and then htacess is trying to redirect to a different one …?
Great write-up too. It was great that you included all of the resources that you used. I think more and more people are going to be switching from blogger to wordpress.
Kim Woodbridge´s last blog post..Writing: First Article at Environmental Graffiti
This is great to know…many are looking to get onto self-hosting..and there isn’t much information on transferring sites.
Susan´s last blog post..NyCreds
Hi Ari! We’re happy to be of service.
I’m enjoying reading your blog.
If you want to easily write and format posts you might want to try Googling the Microsoft Live Writer. Writer is a desktop application that works like word and connects to your blog.
I use it to post to a number of blogs.
hi Ari , I have bought a new Page Ranking domain yesterday and I need to use that domain for blogging. My domain is registered in godaddy. How can I push my new domain to blogger or wordpress?? whether this need a hosting ?? please explain me the procedures to set up.. I’m bit confused , Plz help me.. tanx in advance.. waiting for your reply….
Andy: I think I’ll stay away from Microsoft. I recently downloaded Scribefire, as it works as a Firefox add-on. Though, am currently writing directly in WP.
Praveen: I don’t know what you mean by a page ranking domain, but you probably want to write on Blogger or Wordpress. There are benefits of each, but only you can be the judge. You can visit http://blogger.com and http://wordpress.com and decide. Also run Google searches on both names and you’ll see a lot of blog features comparing the two.
If you want my opinion, go with Wordpress as it’s open source. But Blogger is also very helpful, and the Blogger support community is more active.
Hey Ari, Found you over at doshdosh. After a month of stick-to-it-ness, I’ve decided to go ahead and get my own hosting service. I’ve already purchased the domain from godaddy. I’ve been scratching a sore on my head doing research and trying to figure out whose the best host, yada, yada, yada. The $10 a month deal for bloghost.me sounds sweet, but I’m curious as to what kind of performance you are getting, uptime/downtime, that sorta thing? Granted, I don’t ever expect to get any where near a large amount of traffic, I would still like your opinion if you don’t mind sharing.
Scott´s last blog post..My Road To Recovery
I’ve had zero problems with the folks at Tubu, Scott (bluehost.me points to tubu.net). The $10 annual charge includes 5GB of monthly bandwidth; if you get near it, you’ll be emailed; if you go over consistently, you can pay another $10 for an additional 5GB per month.
It’s a Linux system in Pittsburgh, from an approximate 10-year-old company.
Thanks. I’ve signed up with them and have Wordpress already installed. Thanks for the great info.
-Scott
Scott´s last blog post..My Road To Recovery
Glad I could help, Scott!
I moved my posts from blogger beta to wordpress without using any plugins. I wrote instructions into my blog: http://tjantunen.com/2007/03/21/import-blogger-posts-to-wordpress/
It takes a few minutes and you do not need to use any plugins.
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