Transitioning from Wordpress to Blogger!

Well! Just felt like blogging back for a while, did not want to go through setting up my domain again, so came up with a slightly convenient solution, migrate my blog from the all pervading Wordpress to Blogger.

Yes, you heard it right, transition from Wordpress to Blogger. The only downside is Blogger does not allow hosting of images, so a post has images, they have to be hosted somewhere else like Picasca. Right now, my previous posts, comments etc are transferred to bangaloreinc.blogspot.com except for the individual post images that are still residing on my previous domain, well, as long as the account exists. Will have to think of a way to get those on to other host.

But before that, how to migrate from Wordpress to Blogger, if at all you want to?

The Instructions:

Simply land at http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/

For detailed roundup, here are the steps

Login to your WordPress account and navigate to the Dashboard for the blog that you'd like to transfer to Blogger. Click on the Manage tab below the Blog name. Click on the Export link below the Manage tab. Download the WordPress WXR export file by clicking on Download Export File. Save this file to your local machine. Browse to that saved document with the form below and click Convert. Save this file to your local machine. This file will be the contents of your posts/comments from WordPress in a Blogger export file. Login to your Blogger or create a new user. Once logged in, click on the Create a Blog link from the user dashboard, and then click on the Import Blog Tool Follow the instructions and upload your Blogger export file when prompted. After completing the import wizard, you should have a set of imported posts from WordPress that you can now publish to Blogger. Have fun!

NOTE: This hosted application will only allow downloads smaller than 1MB.

The catch is if your Wordpress Export file is more than 1MB you cannot use this appspot, but rather you will have to go to Google Appengine Blog Converters Project here http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/ and download the latest release to your machine locally, and run the wordpress2blogger scripts on the Wordpress export files, to generate Blogger xml format.

Then create a new blog on blogspot, go to Settings > Basic > Import Blog, voila your blog is instantly transferred to Blogspot.

Caveat: You are very likely to get an error of the format bX-xxxxx, one of the reasons could be that your previous blog posts had tags beyond limit, either edit those posts to delete the tags or delete all the tags (which is what I did), then you ll not have a trouble uploading.

Happy transitioning!