If you can read this… I guess you’ve arrived!! Welcome!!

This will be my last post on Blogger. No, I’m no quitting again… that’s getting kind of old, don’t you think? And this whole new-and-improved-Uisce, too. He’s so fucking boring!

So I’m moving to WordPress and here’s my new address: http://www.whiskeytalking.com/uisce/. Should be pretty easy to remember, no? But please update your blogrolls and bookmarks and all that, because that will just make life better for everybody! :)

Now… for the benefit of the masses who have already begun and will no doubt continue flocking along with me to WordPress, I’ve jotted down a few notes along the way.

Step 1 was to convert my template. You really need to know what you’re doing, there’s no question about it. So kids, don’t try this at home. I don’t want to speak for any of the professionals, but I’ll bet they’re willing to take your money and help you with this or any of the conversion steps. And sure, I do consulting for cash, but I’ve got someone far more qualified in mind for this particular kind of work.

Once my template was ready, step 2 was to import my Blogger posts. And you’ll notice once you arrive at my new home that I pulled in my old Whiskey Talking posts as well as the new ones. I’m actually thinking about pulling in some old content from my previous blog, the one that only some of you know about, and there’s exactly one of you who has been to my old blog but doesn’t know we’re the same person.

Anyway, about the import. I had no trouble at all using the import-from-Blogger feature of WordPress, except that it left out a great deal of content from many of the posts. So here’s how I dealt with that…

2a. Go to each of your Blogger monthly archives (yes, switch to monthly archives if you don’t already have them) and save them to your hard drive.

2b. After you’ve imported, you’ll have monthly archives in WordPress, too. Save each of those to your hard drive. Wait, make sure that you set your reading options to allow 999 posts at a time, so each monthly archive has every post for the month!!

2c. Go through each set of archives and compare them side by side, bit by bit. If you don’t have a tool for doing this, it’s going to be really hard, and I use a certain text editor called Emacs that was designed for programmers and I don’t really recommend for the masses.

2d. As you’re going through you’ll find that any javascript in your Blogger posts was not carried over, not just the script tags but any onclick/onmouseover/onmouseout attributes and even “javascript:” found inside of href attributes! Keep on the lookout for these. You’ll need to edit the WordPress posts and move these by hand.

2e. Anchor tags seem to have targets removed. If you know what I’m talking about, you may want to add some JavaScript to your footer that adds targets to all of your anchors dynamically after the page has loaded.

2f. You have to move your images. Each reference to photos*.blogger.com will need to change… by which I mean that every picture you’ve uploaded to Blogger needs to move, probably to the same host where you’re running WordPress.

2g. Your image tags were probably altered by the import, so if you want them centered or right-justified, for example, you’ll need to alter that formatting for each one. Yes, it’s tedious, but remember, you’ve got to change the URL anyway, so why not do it all in one pass. (And note to self, move stuff off of flickr.)

2h. If you’re using Mister Linky’s widgets, all of your data can follow you to your new blog. If you’ve used the standard Auto-Linkies you created your own post ID’s (or the Widget Wizard did it for you) and you can keep using them. Note, of course, that this is JavaScript and so they had to be migrated from Blogger to WordPress by hand. If you used Ever-Linkies or Comment-Linkies your post ID’s were generated automatically by Blogger. This is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It’s bad because you’ve got one whole set of ID’s in Blogger and another whole set of ID’s in WordPress, but it’s good because Mister Linky will perform this conversion step for you. All you need to do is send him all of those Blogger and WordPress monthly archives and he’ll prepare a script that converts from Blogger ID’s to WordPress ID’s once you’re ready to continue. Be sure to contact Mister Linky before you generate your archives, so he can make sure they’re in the correct format, with all of the ID’s, etc. The other good news is that since the JavaScript was in your templates, you didn’t have to fret over the fact that the importer threw away your JavaScript, which you probably didn’t have any of.

Step 3, relax and have a tall glass of… I dunno, how ’bout a whiskey? After all that work, you’ll probably need something even stronger, but my prescription pad has run out of tickets.

You won’t be able to comment on this post, so if you’ve got something to say, come on over to the new place… I’ll be waiting for you!

\_/ Uisce