Migratory tales (blogger to wordpress)

(Before I get too involved with the story, those of you who followed my old blog in an RSS reader might have noticed that my old posts looked new again. That’s a one-time artefact of this transition and won’t happen again!)

Alas, this blog entry does not detail an inspirational 30-week long migration of some 10g bird, but the 2-hour-long migration of my old blog to its new home.  Don’t worry though, if you’re at all geeky, you might find this a little interesting too.  This entry has two major parts: why I moved, and hints on moving from blogger to wordpress.

Why I moved

My old blog was run on Blogger, and was hosted on a custom domain (blog.witwiv.ca). It was supposed to be a travel blog (hence the url).

As a former Googler (with some good friends who’ve worked directly on it), I really wanted to like Blogger.  However, the more I used it, the more frustrating it got.

1. I could never get photos to align properly.
2. The editor was very difficult to work with, and the beta editor —  supposedly the next best thing since sliced bread –was even worse.
3. I didn’t much care for Blogger’s mobile solutions.
4. GAIA(Google’s account system) logins across domains are not designed correctly. You cannot be logged into two Google services with different IDs. The blog was owned by a google account on my dot-ca domain, but i use my gmail-dot-com domain for most google things. This meant that I had to log out of gmail in order to post to my blog, or use two different browsers. Ugh. This seems trivial, but is very very annoying. So if there are Googlers out there reading this, please fix the multiple concurrent login problem.  There’s absolutely no technical reason that this shouldn’t be able to work, ESPECIALLY across domains (blogger.com/google.com).
5. I didn’t really like the templates much.
6. I wanted tighter integration with static content.

Hints on moving from blogger (to wordpress)

1. First decide on your new platform.  I did a little bit of research — nothing too hardcore — and decided to run WordPress on a hosting site.  I looked at posterous and tumblr, both of which seem nice and snazzy, but I liked the flexibility of WordPress.  Also, it’s way easier to integrate with static content, which was one of my goals.
2. Set up the new domain. I was moving blog locations, so I could set up the new domain while the old one was still in existence.  I used NearlyFreeSpeech, a nifty web hosting site that charges in tiny increments, and only according to how much you use.  (This site nicely describes running WordPress on NearlyFreeSpeech).
3. Import existing posts. This part isn’t so hard; under the admin console, go to Tools/Import, and import the posts (and comments!) directly from blogger
4. Figure out a transition plan. It was important for me to be able to move my blog with the fewest number of interruptions possible. My transition was as follows:
   1. I had never used feedburner initially (big mistake!) so the first thing I did was to set up a new FeedBurner account and link the new blog to it.
   2. Next, I needed to ensure that when I switched over to the new domain, people who had subscribed to my old feed automatically got new updates.  (same for permanent links).  To do this, I first created a new, empty, ‘site’ on my hosting company.  Then, I generated a mapping from old to new locations for  the RSS feed and for each link that was known(google [site:OLD_SITE.COM]).  I used this mapping to generate a htaccess file that would give 301s for these requests. My file looks as follows. (note that the order is important!):

      RedirectPermanent /feeds/posts/default http://feeds.feedburner.com/vijayp
RedirectPermanent /2009/02/madoff-scnadal.html /blog/?p=4
RedirectPermanent /2009/03/first-travel-post-seoul.html /blog/?p=5
RedirectPermanent /2009/03/kindlefeeds-rss-reader-andrew-and-i.html /blog/?p=6
RedirectPermanent /2009/03/how-to-game-amtraks-pricing-scheme.html /blog/?p=7

      ...

      RedirectPermanent /2009/11/new-website-etc.html /blog/?p=16
RedirectPermanent /2009/11/good-random-password-generation.html /blog/?p=17
RedirectPermanent /2009_1_01_archive.html /blog/?m=200901
RedirectPermanent /2009_2_01_archive.html /blog/?m=200902
RedirectPermanent /2009_3_01_archive.html /blog/?m=200903

      ...

      RedirectPermanent /2009_10_01_archive.html /blog/?m=200910
RedirectPermanent /2009_11_01_archive.html /blog/?m=200911
RedirectPermanent / /blog


   3. Next, I switched the DNS from my old blog’s name from ghs.google.com to the new site I created in step (2) above.
   4. Remove some boilerplate garbage (stuff under meta) and change the RSS feed URL to feedburner. (I can expound on this later if people want)
   5. Done! The only issue I’ve seen so far is that Google Reader seemed to think all my old posts were new once the transition happened. I’m not sure there’s any way to fix this, though.

All in all, my new platform should help me get my act together in terms of posting more regularly, and communicating what I’m up to.  And if I’d not been down with the flu, I doubt this would have gotten done anytime soon. So maybe there is a bright side to being too tired to go out on a Saturday night!