The bottom line

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What I learned about migrating a podcast from Blogger to stand-alone WordPress 2.2, if you have been using Blogger’s publish via FTP service to your own domain, and you want to make sure that the change is as invisible as possible:

  • Don’t do it, unless you’ve got several days free and enjoy tedium. You have to manually go through each post to add the MP3 links to each of them. No way around it at the moment.
  • Be grateful you already use Feedburner to produce your podcast feed from your raw blog feed. It makes it so much easier. You don’t? No excuse! It handles everything, including iTunes settings etc. It means your feed address doesn’t change, and with the Feedburner plugin the WordPress feed is automatically redirected to it. See here how it works.
  1. Publish your Blogger blog to a blogspot address, not via FTP or custom domain.
  2. Once you’ve set up WordPress on your server, use the built in Blogger import tool, but only after you add the code to ensure the permalinks migrate properly, as detailed here.
  3. Change your .htaccess file to include these rules, to ensure Blogger labels and archive pages don’t get lost. The archive rule may have to be changed depending on how you have set up your archives in Blogger in the first place. I was using a separate archive directory and my archives ended in _archive.html and I was using permalinks.
    RewriteRule ^labels/([^/]+).html$ category/$1/ [QSA,R,L]
    RewriteRule ^archive/([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{1,2})_([0-9]{1,2})_archive.html$ $1/$2/ [QSA,R,L]
  4. Change your permissions on the .htaccess file to 555 so WordPress doesn’t change it back without asking you, as it has a habit of doing that!
  5. Go through each post and add a link to the relevant MP3 file however you choose. Unlike Blogger, in WordPress, there isn’t a dedicated “link” associated with a particular blog post – you must link the MP3 file to some text or an image in the post itself. So I added in most cases the word “Listen” and linked it to the MP3 file. Feedburner will automatically change this to a podcast enclosure in the feed if you enable Smartcast in your preferences.
  6. Use a player of your choice to allow people to play the files on your website. I use 1-bit because it looks so good.

Personally, it’s been easier because I used a beautiful theme called Barthelme to start my WordPress journey, and its rigorous use of proper CSS styling means future changes won’t be as painful as this one. (Well, I live in hope.) In retrospect, I wouldn’t have gone to the bother of adding Blogger labels to my old posts before migration, it was duplicating effort, as I ended up going through most posts again one by one in WordPress, and I could have added categories then.

I wouldn’t recommend switching ISPs at the same time, though, that was a bit hairy when the DNS change went through – I had to switch the base URL for WordPress on the new server to my domain, which meant that WordPress became alarmingly unusable while the new IP address was being propagated. It didn’t help that my old ISP IEinternet deleted my account immediately on sensing the change, instead of allowing a decent 24 hours to pass to ensure seamless transition. So let me put on record the difference in prices: I was paying €240 p.a. excluding VAT for their Business Hosting Plan. Blacknight offer a WordPress-friendly blog package for €42.99 p.a. excluding VAT, with a 15% discount if you are moving hosts.

It’s been a marathon, certainly, but I know it’s worth it already.