Several months ago, I had a teaser post basically saying that you could import a Blogger.com + Blogspot.com blog’s posts into a WordPress blog. But I didn’t tell you how to do it. Well, I’m about to do convert BlogSpinner V2.0 into V3.0 on WordPress, so I started searching for some information.

I found that WordPress has a relatively easy to follow tutorial on how to import a Blogspot.com blog. Unfortunately, there are three problems with it:

  1. Your content is duplicated on two different domains. Some search engines are rumoured to assign a pagerank penalty for this sort of behaviour, especially if the two domains are linked to each other.
  2. The import_blogger.php script that comes with each installation of WordPress does not import comments.
  3. The steps discussed in import_blogger.php essentially require you to release your blogspot.com subdomain name. The subdomain and your old URLs will still exist, but you will have released ownership of it. You can immediately grab the subdomain back, but doing so wipes out all of the old URLs.

There are several reasons why you may not to relinquish your blogspot.com subdomain name, including trying to maintain pageranks for existing pages. As well, if you’ve built up any popularity for your pages, removing them during the blog platform conversion means producing “404 - page not found” errors.

Andy Skelton has a great tutorial with screenshots on how to use his modified import_blogger.php script to pull in comments as well. But there’s still the issue of losing your blogspot.com subdomain. A more acceptable conversion solution should be to keep your old blogspot.com subdomain and your existing URLs but redirect visitors to EACH page to its counterpart under WordPress. You should also be able to import your comments as well.

I’ve been searching for a solution for quite some time now, but I haven’t found anything that will produce this ideal situation. So I’ve come to the realization that I’m just going to have to do this myself. I could do it by hand, but since I have to do this with a few blogs, I figure I should just write a run-once plugin for WordPress.

For those of you who have read my post praising the Drupal platform, I still love Drupal, but my current Internet host provider has some problems with the way that they’ve set up their mySQL databases. The result is that I cannot get a properly functioning Drupal installation without major hacking. The alternative is to switch to dedicated hosting, which will increase my monthly hosting bill, for all my domains, to nearly ten times my current bill - money I just don’t have right now.

So my two alternatives, as I see them, are to either do a manual conversion between Blogger and WordPress, or to write my own plugin. I’ve already started learning the API for WordPress, and I’m going to start by doing a port of this blog’s template. Once I have a functioning WordPress version, I’ll study the Blogger.com API, followed by learning the WordPress plugin developer’s guide, and finally writing a plugin which I will release for general use.

As you can see, I have a fair bit of work ahead of me, so don’t be surprised if posting frequency drops to 2-3 days per week for a while.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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