Life and Leisure. Tech and Toys.

I just finished moving my blog off Blogger and to my own hosted Wordpress so I decided I should tell a little bit of how I did it. For the most part its straight forward and you could figure it out yourself but if you’d rather read how to do it this is for you.

At what cost?

1. People currently linking to individual articles will be linked to the homepage instead of to the article itself. There are scripts for this but that’s a whole different ball game that I have yet to figure out. It also requires you to use a non-standard forwarding scripts instead of telling Blogger to forward the user.
2. People who read your RSS feed will no longer get updates. They will need to subscribe to your Wordpress feed after you have moved.
3. You no longer get those random visitors from the Blogger bar. You know the bar at the top where users can keep clicking “next blog”.
4. Lastly, if you decide to host your own Wordpress its not free. You’ll need to pay for a host and a domain. I use Dreamhost.

If all this sits well with you keep reading. My personal opinion is that if you have a small blog its probably okay to move if you don’t like Blogger, but if you run a big blog with tons of traffic its never worth it. You just have to stick with your initial choice. Sorry.

Let’s move out!

1. First install Wordpress on your server. Download the files from http://wordpress.org/download/.
2. Follow the installation instructions provided by the Wordpress website. Here.
3. After you’re done with the installation go back to the Wordpress dashboard and click the “Manage” tab.
4. Now click the “Import” tab.
5. Choose “Blogger” as the blog you’re importing from.
6. It’ll ask you to authorize the import. Do what it says and enter your Blogger information.
7. Now all your posts should be transfered over. You’ll want to click “Set Authors” to set the author of each article if this isn’t a solo blog.
8. Now that everything is moved over we can forward everyone that goes to your original Blogspot to your new Wordpress Blog. Do this by logging on to Blogger and navigating to the “Publishing” tab.
9. Click “custom domain”.
10. It’ll ask you if you want to buy a domain, but I’m assuming you already have one so click “Switch to advanced settings”.
11. There will be a field for your domain. Insert your domain here. I put “blog.thaichaiguy.com”.
12. Click “Save Settings”. You’re done. Test it out by navigating to your original blog URL.