Move from Blogger to WordPress

At the weekend I finished my move from Blogger to WordPress. I stayed many years with Blogger because it was so easy to use and to set up. Not much coding needed, no database necessary, easy customization of templates and the FTP upload feature have been the pros for Blogger.

What really drove me crazy was the bad commenting system of Blogger. So I decided to move over to WordPress. In preparation for the move I choosed the K2 template for Blogger which wanted to use for my future K2 WordPress installation a few months ago.

I set up a WordPress blog on my webspace using a MySQL database provided by my hoster. I already had my own webspace and uploaded the Blogger posts via FTP. So I have all my pictures linked in my blog available on my server. No need to hot-link back to Blogger, what they really don’t like and try to stop.

Next step was the import of all my blog entries into WordPress. There is an automated import in WordPress from Blogger.com, but unfortunaty it did not work from my WordPress installation. I turned out that this import script only runs on a wordpress.com blog using a Blogspot account for your Blogger account.

So I changed publishing my blog to my FTP account and published all my posts to Blogspot. Then I set up a temporary blog account at wordpress.com and imported all 1150 posts including all the comments to wordpress.com.

So this went smooth. Now I had to export all posts in WordPress XML format and reimport it to my own WordPress installation on my server. This was really a problem becuase the script stopped at about 600 or 700 posts again and again. So I split up the export file and did it step by step.

To keep all the permalinks which link to my blog I edited the Permalink Options section to use the Blogger format for posts: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html. This was the last big step to redirect http://www.new.kluge.de from the old Blogger directory to my new WordPress directory on my server. Done.

Now I have all my posts and comments in WordPress. And I must say its a huge step forward. Working with WordPress is easy and fast. Lots of usefull plugins available. No coding skills required if you stay with the rich basic featureset.

While moving from Blogger to WordPress I removed lots of things I don’t want to use anymore. Blogcounter, Google Analytics, lots of stuff that a semi-blogger like me added for fun but never used – and what slowed down the performance.

Trying to tweak the K2 design I still face lots of css problems. I have to learn a little bit about css and PHP. But this is something I can do later.

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