The world changes; technology evolves, companies providing free services go back on their promises. Yes, I know that they never really promised it – read the fine print of the terms of service. But it doesn’t make the emotional trauma and fear of uncertainty go away.
Blogger.com just sent me a nice email explaining that their FTP services was being discontinued because, gosh darn, I was part of a small 5% minority who were just not worth keeping around. This means that all my blogs, all my company’s blogs, and all our client blogs have to be reimplemented. All the posts saved and republished. And most importantly, all the URLs have to STAY THE SAME for SEO purposes.
But happily, after a little investigation I found a simple solution that only takes an hour or so of work. Turns out WordPress, the leading Open Source blogging software, has a built in blogger import tool that can be used to capture all your old data. And with a few settings, all your URLs can be saved or redirected. You are looking at the new blog now. Here are the steps I took to accomplish this:
- First identify the FTP location you publish your blogger.com blog. I used to name my index file index.php for home page configuration purposes – since wordpress has an index.php, I renamed this to index.html (so my blog was still available while I was going through this process).
- Goto wordpress.org and download the latest stable version of wordpress and install it per the install instructions included in the download. Configure all the major general settings as appropriate for your blog.
- Install the All in one SEO plugin (goto plugins and click Add New – search for the plugin name and install)
- Activate the All in one SEO plugin
- Goto Settings->Permalinks and under Common Setting set Custom = /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
- Next, log onto your Blogger account and goto Basic Settings – change your hosting option to be blogspot.
- Go back to your WP installation and goto Tools->Import and import your blogger blog.
- Modify your WP template as needed (you will need to read WP documentation on modifying templates)
- 301 redirect old archive files in root of blog – old files are named year_month_day_username_archive.html – I edited and put this html (Example for Nov 2005) into the old archive file:
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0; url=http://www.corporatepa.com/blogger/2005/11/“>
</head><body>
<p>Please follow <a href=“http://www.corporatepa.com/blogger/2005/11/”>link</a>!</p>
</body></html> - delete old content directories named by year
- delete atom.xml
- delete rss.xml
- delete the index.html file you created in first step
This is general outline, if you have problems let me know and I will see if I can help you.
