On the moves to WordPress

Posted by Daniel Johnson, Jr.
September 18, 2008

About a month and a half ago, I announced that I was making the move from Blogger to WordPress.  It’s taken some time, but I think I’m getting the hang of this blog migration thing.  

Moving a blog with lots of content

I have even moved my oldest and one of my largest blogs, Journey Inside My MInd.  It took some effort — that blog with over six years’ worth of content had to get brought in in five pieces.  Here’s how I did it:

  1. Create a new blog with my WordPress.com account to use as a placeholder.  In my case, it was journeyinsidemymind.wordpress.com
  2. Import the blog content from the Blogger blog to the new WordPress.com blog.
  3. Export the WordPress.com blog to an XML file.
  4. Import the XML file to the self-hosted WordPress.org blog, provided that the file is under 2 MB.
  5. Since the file was not under 2 MB, open the XML file and break it up into smaller pieces that were under 2 MB, keeping the main structure of the file intact.
  6. Note about Step 5: that is where having experience in hand-editing the Journey Inside My MInd podcast feed has been handy. I clipped out at the <item> tags.
  7. Import each smaller, bite-sized XML file into the WordPress.org blog.
  8. Verify that the blog posts were imported successfully.
  9. Delete the WordPress.com blog.
  10. Update FeedBurner to reflect the new source feed URL.

Progress thus far

So far, I’ve moved the following blogs:

Future Plans

I plan to move QuotesBlog over and to ramp up production for How I Got My Job.  But first I’m going to merge the Journey Inside My Mind Podcast episodes into the blog, since I’ve opted to let jimmpodcast.com expire.
Moreover, I know I’m definitely going to need to tweak the existing WordPress themes for my blogs to better suit my tastes and branding.  Right now they all look the same.  That’s okay for now, but it won’t last.
Feel free to share any thoughts, comments, or suggestions in the discussion below.

 

administrivia, blogging, branding, get that job blog, jazzmania productions, lessons learned

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