Image source tayzar44

I author a blog using the free Blogger platform. In the beginning this was perfect for my blogging needs, simply to write articles and publish them. I had zero knowledge of SEO, widgets, web 2.0, plug-ins, adsense, keywords, and all the other jargon terms used to describe web publishing techniques and utilities, in all honesty I’m still sketchy now. What I do know from reading various books, articles, blog posts, forum threads, and via email conversations with established bloggers, namely Mehdi @ stronglifts.com, is that Blogger is for small scale diary type entries and WordPress is for ambitious search engine optimized blogs. I actually knew this from the start due to the research I carried out, all signs pointed to WordPress, but the lure of Google affiliation sucked me in to Blogger.

I have decided to make up for this early error and migrate from Blogger to WordPress. How have I gone about this? Initially, as with all things web 2.0 related, I simply googled “how to migrate from blogger to wordpress”, this search threw plenty of posts at me, and as usual I clicked the first link where I was taken to underscorebleach.net for their take on the migration process. All seemed reasonable and I was ready to begin the migration process until I reached the comments sections where I noticed that despite it saying there were 90 comments only one was showing.

The comment is by Blog Bloke and reads:

Blog Bloke Says:
February 19th, 2008 at 11:37 pm I’ve discovered an easier way to move your Blogger blog over to Wordpress, automatically redirect your old posts and should not lose your pagerank either.

Naturally I was intrigued so clicked on the Blog Bloke id and hey presto; I arrived at this post Migrating-Redirecting Blogger to WordPress: The Complete Guide. I read through the post and was convinced this was the method for me. I’m still no web 2.0 expert or approaching anywhere near that status, so the simplicity of this method coupled with the excellent support by Blog Bloke in the comments section, and the engaging nature of his readers left me with a sense of ‘no need to look any further’, so I didn’t.

This is my version of how the migration has panned out. Prior to anything I logged into blogger to backup my template and all the posts that I had published. Just a precaution because I know things will go wrong if I try to cut corners. The backup process for blogger is somewhat disjointed, you can see for yourself here. This process took me longer than I had anticipated so I didn’t start off with the pace I had hoped for.

Next, I followed step 1 of the Blog Bloke guide – Change Domain Host DNS settings. Simple, I logged into my hosts control panel, located DNS settings, and changed them from the host setting to WordPress NS1.WORDPRESS.COM and NS2.WORDPRESS.COM

Step 2 – Import your Blogger in to your WordPress blog. I had real difficulties here. I’m using a self hosted dashboard and the “Import” feature will not let me log in to Blogger. Luckily Blog Bloke suggested a work around for this so that is what I did.

I tried the workaround offered by Blog Bloke but to no avail. I could not find the import button on my self hosted WordPress dashboard. It was time for a little bit of “googling”. From this process I was able to establish that there is a difference between WP.com and WP.org, and that the help forums are individually tailored to each version of WP. This stage of the game took me an age, literally hours of searching different threads until I hit upon the all important missing piece of the jig saw, found here, the version of WP installed on my host was <2.2 therefore I could not import from Blogger. Finally, armed with this info I was heading in the right direction. Didn’t I say at the start that I am less than capable at this web 2.0 business?

So, in about 1 hour I learned how to install a newer version WP.org using the FileZilla FTP client, and how to setup a new directory using Plesk. Now I have access to an all new WordPress 2.2 dashboard, I have managed to import the old Blogger posts and their comments to my new self hosted domain in WordPress.

Step 3 – Park your old Blogger custom domain name. I didn’t need to do this as I was using a free .blogspot domain name. This is what I believe to be true although I’m not entirely convinced.

Step 4 – Create and/or modify the .htaccess file. Blog Bloke’s instructions are spot on. This section only took me 5 minutes max. I will add that when using notepad to enter the contents of the .htaccess file it is important to make sure the file is saved simply as .htaccess and not .htaccess.txt as notepad will naturally try to do. Another way to get over this is to upload the file using an FTP client and then rename it.

Not as simple as it first seemed. I created the file in no time at all, uploaded to my host in the blog directory, and set permissions to 777, but, no redirect. I’m not sure how the redirect is supposed to work if my host does not know my Blogger address? I had no custom name to park from step 3, could this be the problem? I’ve tried to add my Blogger address to the Domain Aliases of my host control panel and still no luck,

Well, I posted a comment on the Blog Bloke blog asking if what I had done was correct. He brought up the issue of name servers (NS) saying that my domain registrar and host should have emailed me these when I set up the host package. I researched with Google and found the following page that states I need 2 NS and 2 IP addresses. So, I emailed the hosts and used a help desk ticket from the host dashboard, this was sent on Feb 26^th at 15.55 GMT, it’s been over 24 hours, I’ve received no reply. In fact the ticket still claims to be new. This is the stage that I am at as of Feb 27^th 19.14 GMT.

I wanted to post this as one piece demonstrating how easy it could be to migrate in a time period of 24 hours using the masterful advice of Blog Bloke. As it happens, it has been a good 2 days so far and that’s no fault of BB. I’ll publish a follow up post when and if I get the vital pieces of information from my hosts.

In the meantime, have you successfully managed to migrate from one blog host to another? If so, how did it go? Let me know with a comment or an email. Cheers.