Saturday, May 30, 2009

Import from WordPress completed!

Yesterday I was casting about for a way to import Wordpress blog entries into Blogger. After continued research I concluded that the tool by Zeaster was the only hope. I had some concerns about running random executables on my hardware so I spun up a separate VM as a (very) basic level of protection.

The good news is that after some fiddling with the settings and restarting the application (which seems to be required for the settings to be read correctly) I managed to perform my blog post imports.

Here are my notes about non-obvious parts of the settings:

WordPress Account

WP URL: This is the address of your blog (and your xmlrpc.php file) including the protocol (http) like so: http://www.fuelforfusion.com/

Blogger Account

Username: This is your full blogger/google username, in my case consisting of my full gmail email address including the '@gmail.com'.

BlogId: As Zeaster comments on his page, this is the ID of the blog that can be seen in the address of a specific blog's admin pages after 'blogID='

For the curious, here is a picture of the main interface of this import/export tool:

Thursday, May 28, 2009

No Easy Road from WordPress to Blogger

There is no easy road from WordPress to Blogger. But maybe there is a goat trail. A feature to migrate from the very popular WordPress to the popular Blogger platform is an often repeated request but for now your hope must lie in third party tools.

  • wordpress2blogger.appspot.com purports to convert WordPress export format to Blogger import/export format. When I tried this tool the conversion was apparently successful, but I had problems on the import of the newly converted file.
  • Zeaster provides a java program that allows you to selectively migrate your WordPress posts. I did not try this option since I prefer not run random code on my machines :)
It looks like I am out of luck for the moment. Does anyone else know of an easy way to migrate from WordPress to Blogger?

A new day, new blogging platform

As any reader can probably tell, I am writing this on the Blogger platform, which is currently owned by Google. My presence here is an experiment after a having hosted an unloved Wordpress blog (whose URL will eventually be redirected). I want to see where the blogger platform is at, and more importantly, how it might take a few options out of my hands and allow me to focus on feeding this blog content.

What are my first impressions? Firstly from visual perspective I am happy given my expectations. I have been reading a lot of Google blogs lately which - being hosted on Blogger - let me to believe the range of Blogger's expressiveness was pretty limited. It actually is quite limited but I was expecting worse. Your allowed to pick a theme and then customise the colour and the layout of the page.

On first brush there appears a large amount of flexibility on the components you can place on your blog as well. Blogger supports Google Gadgets (which work on iGoogle as well) so there are many potential ready-made add-ons you can choose from. Possible too much, given the trouble I have just had finding a working twitter component!

TODO: Investigate Google Gadgets! I figure if in the course of posting a blog entry I think about doing something I may as well note it inline :)

Being an avid Google Reader user I thought to add a component to the side bar to show some feeds I currently have starred (a convention I use to signal to myself that I want to make a followup action). It is interesting that I did not find out how to do this from within Blogger, but within Reader. You can imagine that this decentralisation of some of the (potential) Blogger features might effectively conceal them from inidividual users for a while - Lucky I found it!

TODO: Blog how I added the starred feeds.

Using the blog itself for posting is very simple, as you might expect. As I type this I am not being overwhelmed with options about how this post should look and how it should behave. Rightly so I think. The concept of operating blogs should not be hugely complicated.

That covers off some of my initial comments. Overall Blogger looks like a simple blogging tool. It is not as pretty as some other platforms (such as SquareSpace or Wordpress.org) but with some effort could be reasonably flexible. Being free is also a bonus.

That is it. I will add additional comments about the Blogger platform when they occur to me. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

First post - Testing!

This is a test post. I do not know how many first posts I have written during my time. Welcome to my blog.