I needed a little advice on migrating and I posted the question on LinkedIn.  The generous responses were quick and concise.  It turns out that WordPress has an import feature…awesome!  I was excited to get moving, but this domain was hosted on a friend’s server which was a bit bare bones, without all the bells and whistles you get from new hosting services.  It has been there for about 10 or more years, but I needed more control.  So, I setup an account with a new hosting provider and moved my files over.  Then we changed the dns and all was ready to begin.

The new hosting provider made it easy to install WordPress.  A couple of clicks and I was working in the admin.  I spend an hour or so looking for a theme I liked and voila, we were in business.  Moments later I find the import function in WP and that process began.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.  I was able to make the connection to blogger, but received a generic message that “nothing was imported”.  Frustrated, I tried this a few different ways still with no luck.

I decided to manually pull the content and post them in the new app.  On this blog it was easy since there are only a few posts.  However, I have hundreds of posts on my other blogs and will NOT be copying everything over manually.  I will need to investigate an alternative that helps ease this process.

Once the content was uploaded I made some changes to the templates and added a few widgets and we were done…almost.  Now I had two blogs running with the same content and that would not be good.  My hosting provider offers a redirect function from control panel.  All I had to do was setup redirects for all the pages and we were done.  Well, the redirect function did not work either.  There might have just been a delay, but either way I was not seeing the results I expected.  That meant I needed to edit the .htaccess file and manually plug in each redirect.  This would include the actual post pages and any other page indexed by the search engines.  A little time consuming, but not a huge problem either.

I then added a few more pages and some ads and the job was complete.  Overall, it took about 10 hours to complete, including time spent choosing a theme/template and tweaking the layout.  Another 3 – 5 hours should be enough to make the additional changes I would like.  I’m happy with the results.

So there you have it.  A small blogger ftp account converted to WordPress manually.  Now I have to tackle the larger blogs!

Kevin