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A few weeks ago I took the decision to move my blog from Blogger to Wordpress.

Before doing that, I read a lot of articles about the benefits I could get from doing that. I can say that I’ll never look back, it’s really something I highly recommend.

Blogger is good to start, it’s easy, it’s free and you can have full control of your blog. The weak point is the lack of tools, widgets and plugins that can improve your blog and offer your readers a much better experience.

With Wordpress, it is a whole different story. The problem is that you have to move your blog there. It’s not so difficult, but you must be aware that it’s neither so easy.

Before starting, here are two important points you must be aware of:

1) the procedure described below preserves you Google Page Rank. If your blog is popular already, it’s something you really want to save.

2) if you are using a domain like yourdomain.blogspot.com and you are going to use your own domain name with wordpress, you will lose your Technorati rank. Unfortunately there isn’t any way to inform technorati about this and to save your rank.

Create a brand new Wordpress Blog
First of all you need to create an empty Wordpress blog. You have two choices: create a new blog for free using Wordpress.com or installing Wordpress in your server using a hosting provider.

At first sight the first could be the cheaper choice between the two and surely the fastest. The weak point here is that a lot of features can be added to your blog just if you pay a subscription fee. For security reasons, you cannot install many plugins and you cannot have full control of your blog.

The second is not free, but if you want to invest in your blog, improve it and having complete control of it, I highly recommend it. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s so expensive if you think that many options on Wordpress.com are available only if you pay. At the end of the day, I do think that this latter option is actually cheaper.

As you can imagine, I chose the latter option.

Choose a hosting provider
I’ve reviewed many option, but Dreamhost has been the one which convinced me more. What I got:

- free domain registration: mine is www.lucafiligheddu.com
- 150GB of domain space (Crazy Domain Insane option)
- bandwidth: 16GB/week (a lot…)
- up to 3000 mailboxes
- free Jabber server
- one click install of most open source softwares (more below)
- cost: $ 119.40 / year (if you pay in advance for two years, you can save about 20%)

The one-click install option is that I prefer. You can install Wordpress really easily, with just one click. You can also install the following:

In addition to all of this, Dreamhost provide a great private area to manage your account, one of the best I’ve ever tried do far.

Install Wordpress
With the one-click install described above, it’s really easy: just one-click and everything is ready.

Import your Blogger blog
This is the most delicate part of the story. Not really because it’s difficult, since Wordpress 2.2 offers you this option and it’s really easy to use. The point here is how to preserve your permalinks.

By default, your brand new blog’s post URLs are in the form: http://www.youdomain.com/?p=123.

It’s not good if you are going to import your Blogger blog, you need to change it otherwise you will loose all your permalinks. Open your Wordpress dashboard and go to: Options -> Permalinks. Then choose “Custom” and in the “custom structure” box insert:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This way an old url like http://yourdmain.blogpost.com/2007/6/12/test.html will have a correspondent http://www.yourdomain.com/2007/6/12/test.html in your new blog, and that’s fine.

At this point, you are ready to import your blog. Go to Manage->Import and choose Blogger. Then follow the on-screen instructions. After a few minutes your blog will be completely imported.

Permalink issue
Unfortunately not everything is as easy at it seems. Permalinks are managed in a different way by Blogger and the result is that some URLs of your post will be different from those imported in Wordpress. This is a main issue but you only can solve it manually. This guy has a solution, but that only works with Wordpress 2, not 2.2 unfortunately.

The problem involves long URLs, URLs with articles (”the” etc.) and with special punctuation. Example (taken from this blog):

Blogger’s Post Title: Los viernes, música para tu iPod en iPod Noticias
Blogger permalink: …./los-viernes-msica-para-tu-ipod-en-ipod.html
Wordpress permalink: …./los-viernes-musica-para-tu-ipod-en-ipod-noticias.html

You can only solve this manually. It took a few hours to me to change all my “popular” posts permalinks that were wrong.

To do this, go to Manage->Posts and click on “Edit” for the post you need to modify. Then go to “Post Slug” on the right and insert the text of the link as it appeared on Blogger. Save and that’s all.

Permanent redirection
Everything is now almost ready, all you need is to activate a permanent redirection from your blogger blog to your new Wordpress blog. To do this (it only works with the new blogger), you can go to your blogger account and use the “custom domain” option, inserting your new domain name. That’s all.

Conclusions
At this point your blog is finally ready and you can start customizing it. You can install plugins, widget etc. all by accessing to your FTP account (as provided by your hosting provider). You will immediately realize there are tons of them to improve your blog, something you ‘d never found for blogger.

Enjoy!

blogger, luca filigheddu, moving blog, wordpress