Herself's Webtools

I’m moving my blogs from Blogger to WordPress hosted at GoDaddy. The first move took a week during which the whole site was down. The second took a day. Now I can do it with almost no down time.

First back up your Blogger blog to a WordPress blog. The new WordPress has an ‘Import’ button and you can import from Blogger to WordPress. If you have not got your WordPress set up yet, or if it just doesn’t work, DON’T PANIC. Go to WordPress.com set up a free blog and do your import. It does work there. Some times it times out, just be patient and reload the page when it times out. Then export it to your home computer.

OK now we have a back up of our Blogger blog. Make several copies and stash them in several safe places.

If you have WordPress set up on your home computer, you can import your backup you just made, tweak your theme and fix your links before moving. This is a much easier, less stressful way to make the move and I highly recommend it.

Images: if you have them stored on Blogger fetch copies of them and stick them in an images folder. You need to upload this folder to your new server and change your links to the images on your server in each and every post you have an image.  Or you can just leave the images hosted with Google and the links in each post will be fine.

Files: if you have other files of yours you link to from your blog, fetch copies, stuff them in a files folder and change the links in your posts.

Domain name: if you have your own domain name you need to point it to your new webhost. If you were pointing your domain name to Blogger then you MUST delete the cname record you put in there or it will continue to point to your Blogger blog.

Install WordPress in the root directory of your new server.

Upload and activate your template.

Import your backup file.

Check and fix all your links. Then check them again. ( You will have to re-do all your YouTube Video embedded links, just cut and paste them from your Blogger posts. )

Fix your permalinks:
Select Custom, specify below
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

That will break as few links to posts as possible. The rest you’ll want to add 301 redirects to in your .htaccess file.

Your permalink will not work right away. DON’T PANIC. Go have coffee. It will take about an hour for the permalink structure to begin working.

Your draft posts will have been imported. You must go to each draft post – put a check in the ‘Edit timestamp’ box and click [Publish]. Then when the correct date and time arrives WordPress will automatically post your post.

Don’t forget to :

Update your ad code into your new templates

Update your StatCounter and Google Analytics code into your new template

Update your verification at Google Tools for Webmasters

Back up your new blog

Back up your new blog again

Delete all the posts from your Blogger Blog and put up a ‘we’ve moved!’ post with a link to the new blog.

It took me a week to remember it, but I had made an archive link list for the Blogger blogs. It was very handy for finding broken links so I could create 301 redirects for them. Create an archive of all your posts before the move. There’s a PERL script on the sidebar to do this. Then you can verify your post links translated properly. I found 25%-33% didn’t.

Consider starting out with the K2 theme. It is extremely user friendly and will make transitioning from Blogger easier if you are not comfortable with CSS and template hacking.

see also:
How to do 301 redirects
How to redirect Blogger to WordPress

The eraser does just what you’d expect. It erases your image. If you have a transparent background you can erase the parts of the photo you don’t want just leaving part of the image. This is useful for separating out items in an image.

Convolve blurs your image a bit. This is handy for smoothing out skin tones in portraits. You can also use convolve to sharpen specific areas of your image.

Smudge works as if you dragged your finger across a charcoal drawing. The area you run over will blur and the colors will drag following the mouse.

Dodge – Burn, dodge will lighten areas, burn darkens areas. This is useful for highlighting parts of an image.

Gimp Basics: Beginning