This may be interesting or even useful to Blogger users considering a move to WordPress at some point.
As an interim measure, I changed my Blogger settings to archive monthly and not provide individual post pages, while publishing via ftp. This created a single HTML page for each month of stuff.
Then I changed back to publishing on Blogspot, and changed settings back to allow individual post pages. This meant that I still had everything available to me on Blogspot, including comments.
Meanwhile the ‘orphaned’ HTML pages were put as individual hyperlinks in the Archives section on the WordPress template. I also hacked them about a bit to remove all the links and other stuff in the sidebar. I could have done that by just simplifying the template I know.
Thats where I was a couple of days ago, then I decided I would start actually importing the posts into WordPress. As Supanames do not enable the CURL extensions which WordPress’s import facility relies on this is a manual task…
I have been going into the old Blogger account, opening each post and copying it then pasting it into a new WordPress post – changing the timestamp and making it private. I have been tagging posts up as I go along. When I had a complete month, I published all those posts and removed the link to that month’s archive page.
It works OK, but there are some drawbacks, like losing all the comments I used to have.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that if any Blogger bloggers are thinking of migrating, one of the questions they should ask a host is whether they have CURL enabled!
I might see if I can get that added to the list of requirements on the WordPress Codex.
It took two or three days’ worth of spare time to do February, and I found myself wishing I had not been so prolific in February – 60 posts in 28 days… I also resisted the temptation to change anything and just copied everything even if it is now embarrassing or proved to be wrong.
Thats 60 posts down and only 627 to go. It could be a month or two before I am completely finished – with the WordPress import tool it would have been minutes.
Would these instructions not work?
Unfortunately not. The bloke who wrote them removed the script from the site quite a while ago because he says the built-in import facility (which he wrote) is better.
Since it was written by the same person, there is a fair chance that he used the same technique, and therefore the same php extensions which Supanet have decided not to install. I figured that trying to hunt down a copy of it would be pointless.
I have a feeling that the reason the built-in import is better is because it has improved error-trapping to fail cleanly if the CURL is not found which would mean a fiar chance that the old script would not only not work but would crash something or other.
Ah. Well, erm, in that case just, erm, be grateful that your archives only go back to, erm, ah… July 2004. Oh…
That must be so annoying…Do all the imports require CURL? You couldn’t convert to an intermediary format?
I don’t mind the time. Its nice to have a brainless default activity. I remember spending a whole week re-doing all the filenames and ID3 tags on my music files and it was very therapeutic!
I know I’m talking about something I don’t really understand here, but I get the impression that CURL is a function or set of functions and not a format. The import function uses calls to this pre-defined function. An analogy might be to think of the CURL extensions as being like a DLL in windows which programs have been written to exploit.