Zero Commute

Migrating Classic Blogger To Wordpress (Video)

I held out with blogger for a long time, mainly because it's completely free. Having recently discovered that visitors cannot leave comments that include their URLs, it has really hit home how little control I have over my blog presence with this platform. I don't want it to sound like a huge bitch-fest, because I understand and appreciate that Blogger is free, and it has served me well enough for the time I have used it. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth (translation: I don't want them to delete my blog).

With that having been said, I have a feeling that I'm not the only pissed off person who doesn't want to alienate their visitors in this fashion, and has been waiting for an excuse to move to Wordpress and give one of those dofollow plugins a try. Lifecruiser has been good enough to post some detailed instructions on moving away from blogger, a move I have decided is right for me at this time.

I wasn't sure how the migration would go with my classic template, so I did a dry run using a test server and a fresh Wordpress installation. Fortunately for you, I got the whole thing on video screen capture using a free screen capture tool I found.



It's not exactly Hollywood quality cinematography, and toward the second half my voice starts getting way ahead of the video. What're you gonna do, right? It does show, however, how easy it is to make the switch for those bloggers who are still holding out for fear of technical difficulties.

I only did minor preparations before recording, and these were in the interest of shaving a little time off the video. These things were:

• installed Wordpress (which is only a couple clicks and takes only a few minutes)


• deleted the default "Hello World" post


• opened up the login pages for my new Wordpress installation and Blogger


• pre-typed the login information into above


• opened notepad and named an empty text file

That's really all, and the video ends up being just over six minutes long. Keep in mind too, that users of the "new" blogger XML templates (a majority, I believe) will be able to skip logging into Blogger and doing anything in there at all, which accounts for much of this six-ish minutes. I was forced to do this only by my previous refusal to give way to change (a decision I will stand by, since it ultimately means I'll only end up having to design the site twice, rather than thrice), as the import is only supposed to work with the "new" style blogger blogs.

Of course, it takes some time to pick out a domain name and get hosting but hey, it's the holiday season. You have to expect to do a little shopping. I already have my new domain name in the oven. Stick around for the reveal.

I know it's a pain in the ass to comment here now, but if anybody brings themselves to going through the grueling process, make sure to paste a URL into the comment so I can give out some manual link love. Yeah, I said it.

Labels: blogging

posted by Chris @ 1:52 PM