Moved from Blogger

So, blogger is shutting down the ability to publish via ftp. This more or less forced me to move away from their service. I decided to switch to a WordPress install on my own server (since I have experience from that). The moving process was easier than I thought it would be, but still not pain-free.

I started the move by backing up my blogger entries. This gave me an XML file of about 2 MB. I’ve heard rumours of people with large file sizes here running into time out issues.

The next stage was to back up all contents of my ftp site – if blogger felt that they had to mess around with it. I still want all my old links to work.

Then I switched to blogspot hosting. This worked great. As I wanted, all my images were kept on my server and the entries still referred back to the correct location.

Moving on, I installed WordPress. Did a quick check of all the settings. Added a non-admin user. Then clicked the big import button. I had to authorize the import and pick which of my blogs to import (I have four). Then the process of importing started and passed without any hiccups. Finally, I assigned the non-admin user as the author of the entires (the import button changes to set author when the import is completed).

What broke then? All entries and titles start with a >, looks like broken XML parsing if you ask me – but I’ll live with it. Also, source code seems to be broken right now, but I might be able to hack at that using css.

To summarize – it went better than expected, but not 100% perfect. Now I’m off to hand patch my atom and rss feeds for various planets to announce this move!

PS. A tip – you ought to be able to alter the blogger theme to redirect users to your new location. To achieve that, make the change BEFORE switching to blogspot hosting, as you cannot switch back.