Finally On WordPress

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wordpress-logo1.pngYep, it was a tough row to hoe, but I’ve finally migrated (most)  of my Blogger blog to WordPress.

It was not – and continues to not be – pretty.

I’m a techie, and it still was not easy.  I’ve been pretty busy as work lately (I do ecommerce, and 4th Quarter is king. And then the returns and lessons learned (from 4th Quarter)  trickle in and you’re back in overdrive mode.

That said, here is the quick and dirty good/bad/ugly about the WordPress migration, while the migration is still fairly fresh in my mind:

  •  Again, I’m a techie. I work with PHP and mySql every day.
  • I’ve had a blog for 8.5 years, all on blogger that was published to my own site (here) via FTP.
  • My host for littleghost.com (Concentric/XO) has been my host for about 11 years – and, as a “before the real web” site, they’ve been slower to implement normal things one would expect a hosting solution to provide. For example, back in ~2003 or so when I was getting serious about PHP, the only way one could run PHP scripts on my site was from the CGI-BIN. Really.
  • I’ve got a lot of skin in this game – I have a bunch of local (my home office) tools that I use to post to littleghost.com. Gotta keep this site (and it’s siblings) locally, not blogspot same.
  • Google announced – and broke my mojo – about a month ago that they were phasing out FTP acccounts (like mine). Pissed me off, but I understood.
  • I was (pleasantly) surprised to see my host now supported mySql (4.x) and PHP (no longer in the CGI-BIN: whoo-hoo!), and (and old version of) WordPress.
  • So I set about installing all to migrate my old blog – from Blogger – to my WordPress blog on my own site.

How’d that go?

  • mySql/WordPress installation was a breeze via my host (one complaint: no option to choose what directory to install WordPress in).
  • OK, I gots a WordPress installation in a non-good directory; whatever. Next step, get data from blogger to my site. Fortunately, WordPress provides importers, including those for blogger.
  • Opps, needs to be a non-FTP blogger account.
  • Moved my account to a blogspot account.
  • Tried to import. FAIL. Many googles; still FAIL.
  • Export as RSS feed (XML). Import fails.
  • Google more; find a Google App Engine user who has built an RSS-WordPress format converter. Upload my RSS feed, it returns (pretty snappy, actually – I wish I had bookmarked same so I could give credit where credit is due).
  • Imported feed – I have 600+ entries, only 271 load. I mess with a few issues (my bad, I’m sure), and end up having to re-install everything. (WordPress, re-import)
  • I finally get the bright idea to “reload” the import page. Sure enough, the first 271 entries marked as “all ready uploaded” or whatever, and another few hundred uploaded. A few more reloads and we’re in business.
  • How to port the data from default directory to the “blogger” directory you’re reading this on. Still working on same (WordPress guidance: Move the WP core files to the … without saying what the “core files” are. Google searches don’t yield much (I’m guessing most hosts do better than my old-school one).

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I think that – in the end – this change will be good (’cause I can hack PHP and mySql with the best), but it’s a change that’ll take some time to get to the way I want it and to NOT lose all I’ve written for the area over the years (example: Top Ten Lists).

But we’re here (I have to backfill a bunch of article titles).

Work to be done; but now – after about a month of an hour here/an hour there it’s starting to come together.

Yippee!