Moving from Blogger to WordPress

I have wanted to get into blogging for a long time but I was not sure if I would actually stick with it if I did. I started this blog as a bit of an experiment to see if I could get into regularly writing. I think it has been successful and I plan to continue in the future.

A friend of mine at Perfect Hosting offered to help me with the hosting. This would require me to move from blogger to another blogging system. I chose WordPress for this because it seemed to be the easiest to use with the majority of the features I required. It also has a good plugin system. I liked the idea of having a site that I could control a bit more than blogger but I did not want to lose my posts and comments when I made the switch.

After I got WordPress set up, I was able to migrate all of my old content to WordPress. I was very surprised how easy this was to do. To do this, you click on “Manage->Import” in the WordPress admin site. From there you click on “Blogger”. This will take you to a google page to authorize access to your blogger account. After you do this, you select the blogger blog that you want to import. This imports all of the posts and comments from the blogger blog.

After this was complete, I had to update a few things manually. All of the “labels” from blogger were imported as categories in WordPress. Really, I think the labels are more of tags on a post or at least that is how I used them. So I updated all of the posts, changing the categories to tags and adding just 4 categories. I also had to update some of the formatting of code in the posts as it did not translate well to the new system.

It took only about an hour to get the new WordPress system configured how I wanted and all of my data migrated over from my blogger account.