I had a great epiphany this morning. Why do some work I am behind on when I could convert my blogger blog to wordpress? Obviously I didn’t come up with a good answer, so hours later, my blog has been converted. Here are the steps I followed.
1) Created an account on wordpress.com
2) Published my old blogger blog to blogspot.com as opposed to ketox.org
3) Used the cool import tool to convert my blogspot blog to wordpress
4) Exported the wordpress blog to and xml file
5) Imported the wordpress xml export to my wordpress blog at http://ketox.org/jon/press
I tried using the import tool on my hosted server ketox.org, but there were some errors, so I went through the additional step of exporting to a blog on the wordpress.com servers. This reduced any potential problems with servers and configurations that I saw on forums when I was trying to troubleshoot why it would not work my from my hosted server. I would actually recommend this method to others as well since the wordpress and blogspot servers can communicate with each other and if your wordpress version is up to date then the import and export should not have any issues either.
The second technical problem to tackle (or first maybe, since the conversion task simply involved clicking buttons) was to get all of the traffic still going to http://ketox.org/jon/blog to go to my new url at http://ketox.org/jon/press/. Using some simple mod_rewrite all the permalinks to posts and archive links permanently redirect to my new wordpress blog. For example, an old link to a post like this:
http://ketox.org/jon/blog/2009/01/new-year-2009.html
Will go directly to the new WordPress version! Awesome! The same is true for old archive links like this:
http://ketox.org/jon/blog/archive/2004_09_01_archive.html
Double Awesome!
After getting the redirects to work I spent some time going through the comments to delete spam and other comments. It was both good and bad, made me happy, made me sad. I got to look at the last 5 years of my life. It made me super glad I started this thing and has reinpired me to continue doing this. That way when I am 80 I can go back through it and remember all the funny little things that have happened to me.
Anyways, the new theme can be temporary. I chose it pretty quickly, so I can change it. I also have to go back through and fix up some images that have become broken over time. I figure this is just as good of a time as any.