The disappearance of ERV’s blog got me thinking about moving my old personal blog away from Blogger. You can quickly suck your site over to WordPress, but it’s good to do some preparation first. You can create a WordPress account in seconds. The only hitch I found is that when I imported, all external links in article titles were replaced by permalinks for the articles.
So go to the Blogger version of your blog and check the old posts. Wherever there’s an external link in an article title, make sure that the same link is somewhere in the body of the text. If it’s there, fine; otherwise edit the article and create the link. Go through all your old posts.
You probably should look at your blogger article tags, too. You must edit articles individually in WordPress to change their tags or categories. However, you can convert tags into categories. So if you tag the articles (which you can do en masse in Blogger) with your proposed category names, when the articles are in WordPress you can convert the tags to categories and skip that editing chore. You’ll end up deleting some categories and re-applying them as tags, but that’s better than having everything “Uncategorized.”
Then go back to WordPress, find the Import command, and specify your blogger URL & password. Your articles will be imported. The pictures are still hosted at Blogger. Your cross-links between articles are still pointing to the blogger articles, too.
moar funny pictures
Next, go through all the old articles in your new WordPress version and re-save the pics one by one to your computer (if you don’t already have them in a blog images directory). As you save each one, re-upload it to WordPress and replace the blogger-hosted pic with the wordpress-hosted one. Here’s how: Edit post, delete the blogger pic. Click “Add Media” (first little box that looks like a TV screen), the “Choose Files to upload” button, select file, Open. [WordPress is crunching your file.] You get three choices of sizes: thumbnail, medium, and full size. (It’s probably easiest to go for medium and re-size it with the cursor. Holding down SHIFT sometimes makes it keep the proper proportions.) Click on Insert…
That should work. If your dialog box goes blank, you’ve lost this round. Try again later. Usually the image is uploaded but it might not be inserted. Instead of clicking “Files to Upload” click on “Media”, select the image (latest is at the top), click on Show, and then on the command to Insert. Don’t bother to select Left or Right here, that just hard-codes the alignment. Do it after your image is in the article.
If it fails, I often have two instances of the WordPress open. Close any extras. Re-start browser if that doesn’t work.
Move the newly imported pic to where you want it (drag in Visual tab or cut and paste in HTML tab). Click on the inserted image and select left or right to tuck it into the text or centered to give it its own vertical space. You can edit the HTML view add margin to keep the text from touching the image. I can supply the codes for decent left and right margins (two separate sets).
Finally, fix intra-blog links so they point at WordPress.
I have 1900 articles in Science Notes and my old pictures are still mostly on Blogger. I’m currently going through all my 900 personal blog entries to make sure the external links are in the articles. Then I’m going to suck it over into my personal WordPress blog.
Apparently you can use a 303 Redirect to keep your old blog’s market share or rating.
In WordPress, you publish once; after that you just save and the article stays published. You can also give articles a future date and time and publish them. They will appear at the specified hour.
