I wrote yesterday about how my customer Old Timer & Lily decided to move their blog to their own site from Blogger. I have always believed that your own original content content should be posted on your site first. I originally wrote this about publishing articles, but it applies just as well to blogs.
I have never moved a blog from Blogger before, but I saw the “import from Blogger” button in my control panel so I told my customer it was probably pretty easy. Was I wrong.
It seemed easy enough you click the import button and login, but after trying many times from home and work my customer wrote me that she couldn’t do it. I tried for her and kept getting an error that said
“Could not connect to https://www.google.com. There was a problem opening a secure connection to Google. This is what went wrong:”
Then nothing.
I did some research on the Word Press help site and found there were plenty of folks with this problem, but no good solutions. The suggestions were copying each individual post or using a plug-in for Firefox called ScrapBook and to copy the entire blog, but these ideas seemed like they would take too much time.
Finally I found a solution that worked well. Here’s what I did.
- I went to the Word Press site, signed up for a free account and created a new blog.
- From there the Blogger import worked fine (select “Manage” and then “Import”).
- After that I could export the entire blog as a neat little WordPress export file (xml).
- I saved that to my computer and used that file to smoothly import the entire thing into the OT&L blog.
- I then deleted the new blog on Word Press.
All in all it was just a little work around and was much better and easier than trying to copy each of the 157 posts (and who knows how many comments) individually.
I wanted to say thanks to the WordPress.com site for allowing me to do that and thanks to TechCounter for the tip.
.