title: wordpress2blogger link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/wordpress2blogger/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 214 created: 2009/11/15 14:56:53 created_gmt: 2009/11/15 14:56:53 comment_status: open post_name: wordpress2blogger status: publish post_type: post

wordpress2blogger

It was over 2 years ago that I migrated both my personal and technical blogs from Google’s Blogger to my own Wordpress sites over on lembobrothers.com.

At the time there wasn’t much in the way of tools to reverse the process. About all I was able to find were some convoluted procedures that didn’t seem very promising.

All that changed in January, 2009 with the release of Google’s blog converter software. The converters, which included a “wordpress2blogger” variation, are written in python and come in a form hostable on Google’s app engine or with a shell script wrapper for running in a local console session.

After downloading the code and an .xml export of one of my blogs from Wordpress, I used wordpress2blogger to convert the export into an xml format the Blogger could import.

Testing in a “sandbox” blog specially set up for the purpose, I was pleased to find that my blog imported perfectly. The only shortcoming was that none of the links to the dozens of images I’ve uploaded to my Wordpress blogs over the years could be accessed from the new blog (as expected).

So the task now is to come up with a script to move all those images over into a Google-supplied picasa web album and then search and replace the appropriate URLs into the .xml used to import my blog. That’s not actually as hard as it sounds, especially since at this point I’m planning to keep things relatively “flat” over on the picasa side (Wordpress stored images in a hierarchy that mapped to year, month under each blog’s upload directory. Chances are I won’t need more than a “perl -pi ’s/oldurl/newurl/gi’ import.xml” to get it done.

Of course there remains the question of “why?”

Well, although my present setup is quite nice, I’m painfully aware that most people either can’t afford or don’t want their own domain and web host (although it’s incredibly cheap nowadays). As a sysadmin the challenge of getting things to work under the more limited resources available to the average user is just too tempting to pass up.

Stay tuned here for my progress on this project as I dive in, as usual, for the full immersion experience.

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