(Continued from Part One.) … See the bottom line.
In summary, the options for importing blogger to WordPress I have discovered are:
- The Blogger import tool on WordPress.com. As recommended by T. Jantunen.com and Ronald Lewis, I set up a temporary account on wordpress.com to use its import tool, with the intention of then exporting it to my own-server WordPress installation later. This would have done the job for me relatively well if only I wasn’t a podcaster, even though I would have lost some embedded videos/iframes along the way – but seeing as I don’t have many, it wouldn’t have been too much of a pain. Close, but no cigar. And this is due to WordPress.com’s restrictive policies – but I can’t see how links to MP3 files are a security risk.
- For standalone WordPress installations: Andy Skelton’s Modified Blogger Importer Tool which is a couple of years old now, seemed promising, but the tool has been deleted from Andy’s website.
- Our very own podcaster Tom Raftery made the move, which gave me some hope, but then I saw that it was three years ago now, so his experience is unlikely to be of use to me now.
- According to Techcounter, Ady Romantika had a plugin which used an RSS feed as the source. However in April he notes that since Blogger Beta have changed the way their feeds are structured, his plugin no longer works.
- WordPress.org’s own Blogger Import Tool which may do the trick. But someone from the podpress user group (the podcasting plugin for stand-alone WordPress) tells me that he hasn’t found an importer tool that works to bring in mp3 enclosures from another blog to WordPress.
In considering RSS importing as a likely option, I set about trying to download my blogger feed as an XML file. To my surprise, I discovered that the atom feed since changing to blogger beta now defaults to only 25 posts. It would have been nice to have been told. There is a way of getting a blogger RSS feed to include more, as I discovered here. But first, I had to switch back to blogspot from publishing via FTP, and say goodbye to my old Blogger (pre-beta) template, and switch to a new beta layout. Having a play around with the new widgets available to me, convinces me that it is really WordPress I’m looking for. The upside of this move was that my feed became available at http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, and with the query parameters outlined by phydeaux3 enabling me to download the RSS file in segments thus: http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=100&alt=rss and then: http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?start-index=101&max-results=100&alt=rss I then joined the segments together, and hey presto, a full XML file containing my blog posts, complete with enclosures and embedded widgets, over nearly two years. This, I realise, is my most valuable asset now – no matter what happens, this is my blog in its purest form. But, the comments are missing! They are available separately, which is worrying. http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&alt=rss http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&start-index=101&alt=rss http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&start-index=201&alt=rss http://dermod.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=100&start-index=301&alt=rss Again, put them all together, and I have all my comments in RSS format in a big XML file. But I think that the problem will now be, whether I import from Blogger beta using the import tool and leave out the enclosures (ie strip it of its podcast character) or whether I can import it using RSS and keep the enclosures, but leave out the comments. The RSS import tool is not able to include comments because of a limitation of RSS, not WordPress, I discover here. That’s enough for today. I’ll wait until I’ve WordPress running standalone before I post again. I don’t want to lose my comments, so I shall be at the mercy of the Blogger import tool in its standalone version. Only after I try it, will I know whether I have to manually add my mp3 file links to my posts.