ISerialized .Net, C#, Scrum and agile software development

Converting from Blogger to Wordpress

• Allot of hard work
• Leaving the old familiar Blogger tool
• Learning Wordpress
• Trying to convert my old Feedburner readers to my new domain
• Making the shift without too much traffic loss

Luckily most of my traffic are from referring sites, so I guess with a little work and a couple of emails, I could redirect much of the traffic over to ISerialized.com. Beyond the statistical facts, what are my lessons learned from these last couple of days?!

Wordpress automatic import from Blogger

I never managed to use the import functionality in Wordpress! It allways ended with the following error:

Could not connect to https://www.google.com

There was a problem opening a secure connection to Google. This is
what went wrong:

Unable to find the socket transport "ssl" - did you forget to enable
it when you configured PHP? (19511112)

Thank you for creating with WordPress | Documentation | Feedback |
Version 2.9

I investigated the problem, but never found a good solution. Some blogs claimed I had to do some recompilation of PHP with SSL, but this was out of my reach as I use Web10 for hosting .

Import through Wordpress export file

Actually, this is what I ended up with, and it worked rather good importing posts, tags, dates, published by and comments. The following steps are needed:

1. Go to settings in Blogger
2. Export your blog (exported as XML)
3. Convert your Blogger export file to  Wordpress export format on this page: http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/
4. The following file will be created: wordpress-wxr.htm
5. Import the converted from in Wordpress in Tools->Import->Wordpress
6. Convert your Blogger user to a new Wordpress user

Then all your posts, comments and tags are published on your Wordpress blog, and you can start tweaking!

Post conversion steps

Once you have the posts publised, there are a couple of things to notice:

1. Most likely all your code segments (if you have any) will need to be reformatted from scratch. Please see my related post on how to format code segments in Wordpress
2. Bullet points and numbered lists destroys your formatting. In many cases the rest of the blog text will be of type Format and not Paragraph, so you need to go through your posts and reformat
3. Pictures are not physically copied, only linking to the location on Blogger (or wherever you put your original pictures)
4. All links from one blog post to another must manually be updated to your new URLs
5. "Read more"/More tags from Blogger doesn't work on Wordpress

One step further

In addition, I have also done the following steps:

• Adding permalinks: Update .htaccess to add more readable URLs. Configured in Wordpress under Settings->Permalinks
• Installed the All In One CEO plugin to make posts more search engine friendly
• Feed redirection in Feedburner, as described here
• Webmaster verification, described here
• Add information on my old blog, that it has been moved to a new location.

I'll post an update in a couple of week when I see how what Google Analytics statistics look like

About Paul Eie

My name is Pål Eie (English alias: Paul Eie) I'm an IT consultant working in Stavanger, Norway. My experience spans from AIX to Windows and from embedded C to Uniface, Java, C++ and C#. My blog will involve everything that is related to technology. As long as it might be of interest to either newbies or seniors, I will blog about it! If you find some of my posts about basic old technology, it just means you know more than many of my other readers!