WordPress and Blogger
I can’t quite remember now on whose blog I had seen this mentioned; I know it can’t have been more than two or perhaps three weeks ago. Anyway, for whoever would need this information: there’s an option, in WordPress 2.0’s beta, that allows you to import posts from Blogger to WordPress. This can be quite useful if you want to move to WP, but cringe at the idea of copying/pasting all your old posts manually. Note that this is what I did, back in February, when I moved by Second Life blog to WordPress… It was terribly boring, I tell you. And I didn’t even have that many posts to start with.I’ve tested the feature on two old little blogs I had set up a couple years ago for a SWG character that I never got to finish (since I’ve decided to not try the game in the end) and for another MMORPG-related project. The points I’ve been able to note down so far are:
- It’s easy to use. Just enter your Blogger user ID and password, then click on the blog to import. Voilà.
- The importer worked pretty fast. Alright, the blogs were short, with 10 posts at the most on each of them. Still, it would go way faster than copying all the posts manually, for sure. In fact, it probably took me less time to import both blogs than to post one entry through the Blog*Spot interface (I mean posting in terms of upload time, not writing itself, of course).
- I didn’t lose any post in the process. Again, it may be because there wasn’t much content on the blogs.
- Numbers replaced the titles, but I then realized that the original posts didn’t have titles to start with, so it’s not that surprising.
- Links to images were also imported.
- You can import several Blogger blogs into one single WordPress blog, without deleting the already imported entries. The entries will be sorted according to the date they were posted at. It put them all into the Uncategorized listing, but this was to be expected as well, since Blogger doesn’t handle categories.
- Importing doesn’t destroy the original blog on Blog*Spot. If things go wrong, one can always start the process again.
- I don’t know how the importer would behave regarding comments, since my blogs were so old that they dated back to when Blogger didn’t have a commenting system yet. I suppose it would import them as well. On the other hand, comments handled through HaloScan or another third-party tool probably wouldn’t pass (I’m taking a guess here, don’t take my word on it).
More will be added if I perform further testing, but for the moment, I don’t have any “real” Blogger blog under the hand, since I’ve never used the service extensively…
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Comments
Benjamin Solah
Interesting. I didn’t even consider importing my old blogger posts, thought it too much of a hassle. I’ll have to try it, when 2.0 comes out of beta
Yzabel
I’d be tempted to say you could already do it now; I’ve found the beta to be stable enough to handle that so far, and perhaps a simple database backup that could be used to replace the DB on a version 1.5.x could work. Of course, that’s just me liking to tinker here, so indeed, better wait if you don’t want to bother toying with that 😉
Benjamin Solah
It’s also the fact I’m feeling kind of lazy :p