The Fit Blog

Blogger has been a great blogging framework. During the course of the last few days, however, I’ve migrated over to WordPress. I still use Blogger for some other blogs of mine, but as The Fit Blog grows, I figured I needed to move to another framework that supports more features. Blogger doesn’t offer the same sort of trackback system that most of the other frameworks support. I’m also not really fond of the commenting system on Blogger. There are also some other issues, particularly when using their FTP process, that I’d like to see changed. I’m not saying that Blogger isn’t a great resource. It is. It’s just that it isn’t right for me for this particular blog.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a constatly maturing product that has a huge user community and numerous features and plugins that I’m hoping to eventually take advantage of. For the time being, however, the site is pretty much the same as it was on Blogger except for a few minor differences (though the commenting is quite a bit better IMO).

If you’re a little interested in the technical side of things, read the rest of the article after the jump…

Migration wasn’t that painful, but it wasn’t an entirely straight forward process either. Having had this blog setup as a Blogger FTP site made it not possible to use the WordPress “Blogger to WordPress” migration wizard. Instead, I had to do it somewhat manually.

I first exported the Blog to a Movable Type import file (lots of info available on how to do this - just search in Google). Then I imported into WordPress with only a few minor glitches on a couple of the posts. Unfortunately in order to maintain the permalinks, I had to then get a list of all the old Blogger permalinks. The next step was performing some updates in the wp_posts table of the WordPress database so that the permalinks were the same as they were on Blogger. Blogger caps the post name at 40 characters and likes to remove words like “a” and “the”.

I did a test run of the entire process first on a LAMP virtual appliance. This let me screw up a bunch of times withouth having to worry about what I’d done. Once the posts were imported properly into my LAMP vm, I just exported them again in a WordPress format for importing later into the actual site.

I downloaded and installed the latest WordPress onto my web host. I put everything in a subdirectory of thefitblog.net and worked from there as to not disrupt my current Blogger blog. I imported the content and messed around with the header, footer and sidebar php files until things looked pretty much as they should.

Fortunately, the default template for WordPress is practically the exact same template that I was using on Blogger (a port of the Kubrick theme). So not really having to worry about the layout made things a little easier.

Once complete, I just set the blog directory to the root dir of my site through the Options section of wp_admin. I then simply copied the index.php file to the root and edited it to point to the subdirectory I was initially working under. And that’s all there was to it - The Fit Blog is now happily migrated to WordPress.

Update: In order to also keep the existing atom.xml and rss.xml feeds, I modified the rewrite_rules entry in the wp_options database table.

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