I have managed to get my site up and running on wordpress on a NEW domain to the domain I had when I was on blogger. I have done a 301 redirect like this… Redirect 301 /blog/noproblem.html http://noproblem.org.uk/ The old blogger was at http://www.choiceforum.co.uk/blog/noproblem.html

OK so now you can see the two sites that I am having difficulties with.

What I can’t get my head round is how to get all the folders like 2010,2009 that reside in the choiceforum/blog folder to move to noproblem/blog. I know I can just move the folders as they are because then clicking on the archives in the new blog will show an error.

Do I need to do another 301 redirect? If so what do I need?

I’ve got myself in a pickle haven’t I?

In wordpress, go to Settings > Permalinks and change to the ‘Custom Structure’ and then enter: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Have you already done that?

I hope you have read my question above?
Maybe you can help me with this problem asap. I would be very thankful!

This week is the deadline for the transfer from blogger to wordpress because blogger is removing ftp blogs.
And I hoped to fix this before.
I don’t know what will happen when blogger is shutting down all the services. I hope we won’t loos posts etc.

Thanks in advance!

Leonie

This was really helpfull! Thanks a lot.
We have build a webshop a while ago with a blogger ftp blog but now we had to switch because blogger is closing down ftp blogs. We choose to use wordpress now!

We almost managed to get everything solved but only one thing isn’t working yet. The permalinks of our blogposts are still referring to our old ftp blog. We did find out it’s possible to change the permalinks of every blogpost to make it refer to the wordpress blogpost but it we rather not change the permalinks because of google ranking. Could you tell us how to make all blogposts refer to the blogpost with the wordpress environment and not on the old blogger environment.

Thanks a lot!

Leonie Mizee

The categories have been imported properly because I can see them in my WordPress as well as on my site. But when I click the link to any category (www.arbitmba.com/categories/ I get a page not found error.

Has anyone else faced this problem? ANy idea how to resolve it?

In wordpress, go to Settings > Permalinks and change to the ‘Custom Structure’ and then enter: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

I was going just fine with your great HowTo until the permalinks bit. Seems WordPress is having trouble converting the post name to be identical to the originals.

For example, take the post with URL http://landscapemodelling.net/blog/2008/08/mind-the-gap-manuscript.html

The link to this post is correct from post name in the archive page for that month (http://landscapemodelling.net/blog/2008/08)

But from links within other posts (e.g. first link in the post at http://landscapemodelling.net/blog/2010/02/mind-the-gap-paper-in-press.html) the postname section of the URL is incorrect (post name in the URL becomes mind-gap-manuscript.html whereas it should be mind-the-gap-manuscript.html)

I’m confused. One problem might be that after changing the Permalink Settings in WordPress to Custom Structure the Maintain Blogger Permalinks plugin fails (returns error: Sorry I couldn’t find any blogger_permalink custom fields, did you run the Blogger importer yet?) Note that I followed your instructions to the letter to this point…

Any ideas? Thanks for any suggestions.

Cheers,

James

Yes, content and design are entirely separate so no problem changing the look. The content will stay in tact.

Quick question. I am thinking about redesigning my website and blog to freshen it up a bit.
After importing my blogger blog into WordPress, can I apply an new WordPress template to the old blog data?

Thanks…

I do appreciate your help, and actually, I’m glad that you straightened me out on the permalinks.

Thanks again!

Shelly

So, while the actual feed address will be different, the links to the old posts within the feed should match those in the new feed. That make any sense or am talking at cross purposes?

I’m afraid people will need to re-subscribe to your new WordPress feed.

When I go to Google Reader and look at the properties of the feed I had set up before the migration, it’s says it’s looking for this address: http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shellykang.com%2Fatom.xml

When I go to the folder on my computer where I backed up all the data that was in shellykang.com before the switchover, there is a file named atom.xml right there in the main folder, which I think must be what Google and the other readers are tapping. Similarly, there is a file named rss.xml in the same spot.

When I go to the main folder on my server now, there are no files by the same names, but there are wp-atom.php and wp-feed.php and wp-rss.php, etc.

So what I need is to figure out how to get WordPress to write the feed files by the old file names. Am I totally out of luck? I’m going to go cross-post this on the WordPress forums and see if I can get any non-smartie-pants answers over there.

Thanks again!

Shelly

Have you tried changing this:

In wordpress, go to Settings > Permalinks and change to the ‘Custom Structure’ and then enter: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

I think that matches the Blogger style structure so could well sort the RSS feed. Let me know how you get on.

I have one remaining problem, and I’m wondering if you’ll know the answer. My RSS feeds aren’t working for readers who were set up before I migrated the blog. The current RSS files must be named differently than the ones Blogger was making. I tried explaining the problem and asking for help here – http://wordpress.org/support/topic/361156?replies=6#post-1385979 – but haven’t gotten anything useful yet.

I was a computer programmer in a previous life, but not a web programmer, and not since I had kids six years ago. I need rudimentary explanations. If you have the answers, I will – well, I will really appreciate it. Thanks! Shelly

In case anyone is interested, I have just blogged about Pros n Cons of Custom Domain vs. WordPress here: http://the-complete-man.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogger-ftp-shutting-down.html

(That’s not the impacted site though )

No, it didn’t for mine! I used this exact procedure for this blog when I migrated last April. My advice would be to simply ensure that your images directory retain their place in the FTP heirachy in WordPress as they did with Blogger so if they were like this:

http://www.nikhil.com/blog/uploaded_images1

http://www.nikhil.com/blog/uploaded_images2

http://www.nikhil.com/blog/uploaded_images3 before, simply ensure that they stay this way with WordPress and then the relative links to the images in your posts will find the images in the same place.

What about my Doubt #2 – I am afraid that moving my blog temporarily to blogspot based would convert the image URL’s to blogger / picasa URL’s or do they not? Actually I post my images to 3 different directories based on their type, its not just uploaded_images folder but 2 other folders as well. Any thoughts?

Would be on the lookout for your followup post anyways!

I haven’t re-run the steps that Damian has mentioned to document any differences in the procedure. The full way I originally documented should still work fine. However, later today I plan to re-do a blogger migration and see if there is an easier way to do it now and retain all url’s etc. I will add a new post on the subject and post a link here when done.

However, if you read what Damian has written, you need to change to blogspot based Blogger hosting, then install WordPress on your FTP site (retain your uploaded_images folder in the same location as I have documented in the comments above) and use the built in import facility within WordPress (current WordPress version is 2.9.1) to import from your Blogspot based Blogger blog.

Doubt1
======
I am not sure I understand the simplification which Damian Hospital is talking about, so just reconfirming:

Basically we still have to do Step 1 and 2 – i.e. move the blog to non-FTP classic blogger template.
Then jump to step 6 which is delete the files (original blog posts etc) on the FTP server. Go through step 7 and 8.

Now on step 9, we use the Import from Blogger option than import from WordPress.

Now do we still need to do steps 10-12?

Doubt 2
======
If we convert the blog (even if temporarily) to blogspot.com hosted blog in step 2, won’t blogger convert all image URL’s to its own servers than keep pointing to the “uploaded_images” folder? My guess is that the images will now be on a Picasa album. So how would reuploading the “uploaded_images” folder again after import, reset this?

Have you installed WordPress on your own FTP site yet?

If so, and you followed the steps above you should still you have the ‘uploaded_images’ directory (that Blogger made) on your FTP server – you should leave it there (e.g. http://www.joe.com/blog/uploaded_images/)! The imported version of your blog (FTP hosted WordPress) will still reference ‘uploaded_images’ so all your posts and the relation of your images to them should stay in tact. If you have downloaded that images directory, on your new FTP based WordPress blog, the ‘uploaded images’ folder needs to go back in the same place so upload it back to http://www.joe.com/blog/uploaded_images/ (when using ftp software, it should be uploaded next to the WordPress folders wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes.

Thanks for the info. I did not get that last line. I there any way to move the images to wordpress too? I moved my ftp published blogger to wordpress but the images point to and are still on the old ftp/domain. I think your last line tried to explain that…

The images make it as long as they copy and uploaded the uploaded_images dir.

Thanks,
Damian

I’m not sure. Perhaps WordPress has improved it’s import facility since I used it to maintain the url’s etc. I’d say as long as your WP url’s match the old Blogger based url’s everything is fine.

Cheers – Ben

The key point for you is step5. Think of it conceptually like three glasses (services) and one drink of water (your content).

Glass One is the Blogger service, which currently holds you glass of water and each time you add a post it immediately pours the contents into Glass Two:

Glass Two – this is your own FTP based website e.g. http://www.sue.com/blog

Glass Three – this is the WordPress.com service.

You want to temporarily pour your blog from Glass One (Blogger) into Glass Three (WordPress.com) so that you can empty Glass Two (your FTP site) of the existing posts (which have up until now been poured there by Blogger) and then fill your own FTP site (Glass Two) from the contents of Glass Three (WordPress) instead.

Therefore, at Step 6 you are deleting the contents of your blog directory apart from the images folder to make way for the content that the FTP based WordPress is going to bring in. So, your blog directory will still be http://www.sue.com/blog for example but it will be empty of posts until you import the WordPress file into your FTP version of WordPress.

Hope that helped rather than confused matters. Just make sure you back everything up just in case.

Thanks for the instructions. With Google’s March Mandate, I am trying to Migrate to WP. All of your steps work fine until I hit a problem with #10. And now I’m almost in panic mode.

I had to go to Justin’s site to get the zip file. And unfortunately when I try and Maintain Blogger Permalinks I get “Sorry I couldn’t find any blogger_permalink custom fields, did you run the Blogger importer yet?”. So all of my links were “too long” and didn’t match my original Blogger FTP HTML names.

So I deleted my posts and just imported directly from Blogspot to my WP domain name, instead of using a WordPress.com dummy blog, and it appears that my links are matching now, although I am still skeptical that something is amiss.

So my question is: is Step #9 needed for image URLs or something else?

Any theories on why I couldn’t follow the steps and why Justin’s program was looking for Blogger import and didn’t convert my WordPress.com dummy blog XML correctly?

Thanks,
Damian

I can understand the pluggin for the archived pages, but I can’t get my head round how to make the wordpress blog have the same website address as I have at the moment. Will that happen when I import the blog automatically?

Sue