Converting Blogspot / Blogger to hosted WordPress

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

First Try

Migrating your Blogspot or Blogger weblog to a hosted WordPress installation should be easy.  But you may run into some problems along the way, so here are some quick ways to make it less painful.

When I first attempted this, I used the Blogger Importer plugin found in the “Tools” → “Import” menu of a new WordPress installation.  It went OK.  The importer pulled in all of the posts and the comments, but there seemed to be some extra markup that made it’s way into the posts.  All of the post titles now started with “>”:

>Why Hello There!

Also, while images in the content seemed to be fine, none of the media was actually imported into WordPress, they were still being hosted on blogspot.com.

Resetting the WordPress installation to start over

So now WordPress has a bunch of content that I want to delete so that I can start over and hopefully get it right the next time.  For this I used WordPress Reset.  I was able to use it to remove the (bad) imported content and reset it back to a new installation.  It’s multi-site friendly and only restored the one site and left all the content from the parent and sibling sites alone – although I can’t vouch for what it would do if you ran it on the parent site of a network installation.

A 2-Step Approach

Now that I was back to square one it was time for a different approach.  After some reasearch, someone on the WordPress Forums mentioned using WordPress.com to do the Blogger import, then exporting from WordPress.com as a native WordPress export file (WXR / XML), and import that file into your new WordPress installation.

Importing Blogspot / Blogger to WordPress.com

So over at WordPress.com, everything is like a normal WordPress installation, except they have turned it up to 11.  They have powerful servers, and a dedicated staff that make amazing additions to the most popular free plugins – one of which is the Blogger import.  On WordPress.com you have an additional option to import a Blogger export file:

Rather than authorizing the plugin to get everything from the site, we’ll export it to a file. Log into your Blogger account. When you’re logged in and viewing your blog there’s a “Design” link in the upper right menu bar, click that. Once you’re at the Blogger administration page click the “Settings” menu, and then “Other.” You will have an option under “Blog Tools” to “Export blog”:

Take that file and import it into a new WordPress.com site. You’ll want to make sure that this blog is public (but not necessarily indexed by search engines) as our hosted WordPress installation will need to be able to pull media files from it, but we don’t want it to wind up on Google, as it’s only temporary. It might take a while to fully complete, but WordPress.com should bring in all your Posts, Comments, and Media just fine. Once you’re sure that it’s done, export the WordPress.com site through the “Tools” → “Export” menu, selecting “All Content.”

Importing WordPress.com’s export into a hosted WordPress site

Before we begin importing the content from WordPress.com, two things should be changed in the WordPress Importer plugin‘s wordpress-importer.php file, which can be done through the plugin editor.

Just so we know when the importer runs into issues, change IMPORT_DEBUG to true:

/** Display verbose errors */
define( 'IMPORT_DEBUG', true );

Then to make sure we get everything, find the line that starts with:

$post_exists = post_exists( $post['post_title'], ...

This was on line 539 for me.  Comment it out using slashes:

//$post_exists = post_exists( $post['post_title'], ...

Then just below that line add:

$post_exists = false;

I did this because when WordPress.com imported images from Blogger, it gave them the same name as the post title, So if a post was called “Why Hello There!” and it had 5 pictures in it, all 5 pictures also had the title “Why Hello There!” This was preventing the importer from getting everything. Plus I already reset the installation, so there’s no content to duplicate or overwrite anyway. And I reasonably trust that I want to retrieve everything contained in the WordPress.com export file.

Run your import and everything should go smoothly. After you’ve verified you have everything in your new hosted WordPress installation, you can delete your WordPress.com site or make it private. You may also want to undo the WordPress Importer changes for future imports.

Filed Under: Tech Talk Tagged With: , , ,

Online WordPress training at 9seedsCoaching.com

February 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Over the past few years we’ve given presentations at dozens of events around the country teaching people how to take their WordPress skills to the next level. Locally we run the monthly Las Vegas WordPress meetup group. Why do we do these things? Because education is one our passions. Empowering somebody to take control of their website is extremely rewarding and something we really, really enjoy.

So why not do it on a regular basis?

We are proud to announce the start of our online training program, 9seedscoaching.com.

What is 9seeds Coaching?

We are starting a weekly series of online training classes. Each class will be about an hour long and will focus on a specific aspect of WordPress. For example, on Wednesday February 15th we’ll be covering WordPress 101, a quick guide to getting started with your new WordPress site.

Each week’s session will cost $7.00 and we’ll let you know ahead of time what topic we’ll be covering so you aren’t locked in to paying for weeks that don’t interest you. Basically, you can come and go as you please. Learning on your time at your speed.

We will be recording the sessions live on Wednesday afternoons with moderators taking questions in real time. Previous sessions will be available via the 9seedscoaching.com website for replay soon after.

What do YOU want to learn about?

When you sign up at 9seedscoaching.com, the first thing we ask you is what the #1 thing you want to know about WordPress. Believe us when we say, your vote counts! We want to provide the information you are looking for. We read each and every submission and we’re planning our upcoming training sessions accordingly. If there is something special you want us to cover, just let us know.

This has been something we’ve talked about doing for over a year, so we are VERY excited to see it take shape. We look forward to seeing you in class.

Filed Under: News

Client Spotlight: Joe the Biker

December 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

One of the great things about this line of work is getting the chance to meet folks outside of the realm of tech who do a range of neat things. Joe the Biker is one of those people.

It’s probably not anything you’d expect from a big, bad biker. In fact, Joe the Biker – aka Joe Wojcik – is a really nice guy on a mission as a motivational speaker and advocate for kids who are victims of bullying. The passion behind his work stems from his personal struggles being bullied in his childhood, and dealing with the effects of that experience well into his adult years. Joe’s triumph over those challenges is a valuable lesson that he continuously shares to empower kids and their families, and his online presence serves as an important tool that connects him to the community and those he aims to help.

Unfortunately, keeping his old website current had become an increasingly frustrating task for Joe. He had gone through several iterations of his site and was getting tired of dealing with a webmaster to have updates done. A personal friend of his was kind enough to recommend 9seeds to help Joe find a solution for his website woes.

Joe wanted to be able to modify content on his own, and his old site just wouldn’t let him do that. He was willing to give WordPress a shot. Since he was generally happy with the look and feel of the old site, we customized a Genesis Child theme to match his existing design. We then moved all of his content over and made some adjustments to his liking. Since Joe was new to WordPress, we set him up with a bit of training and provided him with a number of key instructional videos that he could reference at any time.

Managing the new Joe the Biker WordPress site has restored Joe’s sense of flexibility, and he’s expressed how happy he is with the end result. Joe recently wrote, “For the first time in four years I feel a sense of freedom knowing that as my project unfolds I can readily update my site…”

We’re pretty proud to have played a part in enabling Joe to continue spreading his message and make a difference for those who can benefit from his movement. Kudos, Joe!

Filed Under: Client Spotlight Tagged With:

2011 Holiday Schedule

December 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The holiday season is upon us. It’s time to go hang out with friends and family and look back on an amazing year.

December 14th will be our last full day in the office this year. We will be back at our desks digging out from under a mountain of email on January 2nd.

Have a terrific holiday and we look forward to working with you in 2012.

Cheers!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , ,

Client Spotlight: The Chrysalis Corporation

August 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Most of the time companies go out of their way to tell you all about the HUGE projects they’ve completed. Heck, we’ve done it ourselves. But the smaller projects come and go without much fanfare. We intend to change that with a new series of posts highlighting some projects that we’ve done where they may not have been big projects, but for the client, the end result was just what they needed.

A few months back we got a call from Michael Spremulli from the Chrysalis Corporation, a service provider of pre-employment assessment solutions. The former Chrysalis Corporation website was comprised of static HTML pages that were becoming increasingly cumbersome for him to update and maintain. Although Mike was brand new to WordPress, he knew that he wanted to take his website in that direction, and that’s where 9seeds entered the picture.

Mike came to the table already armed with a vision for the new Chrysalis site. Based on his needs, we took an existing StudioPress theme on the Genesis framework – the Enterprise child theme, to be exact – and made some custom design changes to match what Mike was looking for. On top of that, we created some custom post types to allow him to easily add new assessments. To ensure Mike would be comfortable with his new WordPress back-end, we provided him with a bit of training, and walked him though all the steps he needed to update and maintain the site.

In the end, the newly-converted Chrysalis website went live and is working well for Mike. He likes the SEO-friendly aspect of his WordPress site, and is thrilled with the ease of updating content without having to contact a developer. As it turns out, he’s received a consistent string of compliments from his existing clients about the changes and is also converting leads better than his old site did. It’s definitely the kind of turnout we like to hear!

Getting kudos from clients we work with is always very much appreciated, so you can imagine how flattered we were to see this video review that Mike made about our services. It was quite a nice gesture to mark the implementation of another 9seeds project. We’re just glad that he’s happy with the end result.

Thanks for your kind words, Mike!

Filed Under: Client Spotlight Tagged With: ,
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