Just last week I finally worked out how to convert my blog, which had been on Blogger for years (but always self-hosted), to WordPress, on my own dedicated web server. I did it with a method that many people no doubt know about, but it was not one that I read about at all.
In the more recent versions of WordPress, there’s an easy import function from many different blog platforms, and Blogger is at the top of the list. But every time I tried, it always told me I had zero posts. I wracked my brain and searched for any answer, and found this:
If you have your Blogger blog hosted at blogspot.com, import will work for you fine. If you have your Blogger blog on your own server, it won’t work at all.
So, you just republish your blog on to blogspot.com (found under the Publishing options in Blogger), then use that address to complete the import to WordPress with no trouble at all.
It helps after to put your old Blogger blog publishing options back at their original location, so you only have two versions out there. But it should be all good from there.
The other handy thing I did was create an .htaccess file on my old site to redirect the main URL and my popular Underbelly character guide to the new version. That’s good for the search engines, since people will most likely still find it under the old address.
If anyone is wondering, I considered changing to WordPress for a while, but what made me finally move was a simultaneous screw-up of both my web space (it was just Optus user space, only 10MB, which I’m sure was part of the problem), and many Blogger options, where things such as the image upload and archive options just never seemed to work completely properly for me. Blogger seemed like a good idea when I first set up this blog way back in 2001, but the other options out there today are so much better.
And WordPress so far is amazing. There’s just so many things I can do, I’ve barely tried them all yet, and it’s already so good. The database style of it has a lot of power, and I can ever backup locally if I want. And I’ve barely touched the surface with the plugin options out there.
Hopefully this little guide reaches anyone who faces the same blog problems I did. Feel free to respond below in the comments if you need any more advice on this topic, and I’ll definitely reply.