Facibus On Blogging

This is the seventh in a series of get a real blog posts, designed to help you make the jump to self-hosted blogging (if that’s what you want to do).

Content migration is a bit like installing blog software, it is either easy or hard. Unlike installing blog software, however, the easy way is still a fair bit of work, especially if you’ve been blogging for a while and have racked up a lot of posts.

Note: the following instructions apply to WordPress specifically - most other blogging platforms have some form of assisted content migration (i.e. some mechanism for doing it the easy way). That said, this is an overview rather than a comprehensive guide - I’ve tried to mention the really important stuff, but there will be a hundred variations on this advice depending on:

• how complex your old and new blogs are in terms of plugins/tagging/graphics,
• the platforms of your old and new blogs, and
• your familiarity with HTML/XHTML.

The easy way
The easy way is assisted content migration. Here’s how you would do it if moving from a Blogger blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

1. In the new blog, go to Dashboard > Manage > Import
2. Click on the Blogger link.
3. Click on the Authorise icon.
4. Click on Grant Access (or if you haven’t done this before, enter your Google ID and password). If successful, you will be presented with import options. If not successful, you will be doing it the hard way (see below).

Going from wordpress.com or another WordPress blog to a new WordPress blog is easier - WordPress exports (Dashboard > Manage > Export) an XML file that contains posts, comments, categories and pages - you then import this using Dashboard > Manage > Import and select WordPress. It doesn’t import tags if you’re using an earlier version than WordPress 2.3 on either side - if you are using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on the old blog then it does save the tags as categories (and if you are a tagaholic then this can be a nuisance to clean up, but it is still better than doing it the hard way).

Note: Regardless of migrating content the easy way or the hard way, you’ll need to change internal links (links from within posts to other posts) to reflect your new domain name/URL structure.

The hard way
The hard way is manual copy/paste. I don’t need to tell you that this could be a real pain, especially where there are hundreds of posts containing a lot of images.

Depending on what your source blog is, it can be easier to copy from the smart editor (Visual editor in WordPress) than the raw HTML code - it is worth testing this to see if the links are preserved (that is, they stay and work after pasting into your new blog). If you are familiar with HTML/XHTML you can edit links as you import individual posts or the whole lot by search-and-replace.

Graphics need to be moved to the new hosting and relinked, unless you can be 100% certain that you will never be shutting down the old blog, and the links within your posts are absolute (that is they contain the whole link, for example http://facibus.com/onblogging/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/ipblogvanilla.gif) as opposed to relative (for example, ../uploads/2007/12/ipblogvanilla.gif)

Migration checklist
It is worth checking the following after content migration to ensure that they are working:

• post order matches that of the old blog (if not, you could have to re-timestamp some or all of the new blog posts)
• comments are intact and link to the comment author
• plugins are up and running
• posts are categorised the way you want them (i.e. your category list is not ten miles long with all your tags turned into categories)
• graphics are intact
• links from one post to another are intact and reflect the new domain name/URL structure

Next: Promoting your changed domain name to retain old readers (and get new ones!)