Blogger.com does not allow images that it stores to be hotlinked from sites other than its own. So if I want to migrate a blog from Blogger.com to another blogging platform, I would have to move the images to someplace else. While I did it manually with this blog, since there weren’t a lot of images and many of them were already hosted elsewhere, manually moving images and updating URLs when there are hundreds of them is far too much work for me.
I have managed to move Stochastic Scribbles to a self-managed WordPress installation. Since I’m using my own domain name for the blog, all links to the blog itself that’s lying around the Web will still work, although links to individual posts will not. Now all I have to do is wait for the corresponding DNS update to propagate around the Internet.
After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, and with a bit of help from the IntenseDebate team and Josh Fraser’s blogspot2id plugin (OK, a whole lot of help), I’ve managed to revive the old IntenseDebate comments that were lost. With a copy of the exported comments in XML, I modified the plugin to read them from a local file and got it to import all the comments back into IntenseDebate.
However, when I actually looked into one of the blog posts, alarmingly the comments were missing. Fortunately, a single spurious comment was enough to get the rest of the comments showing again, which was a tremendous relief.
For someone who had absolutely no experience in PHP until a few days ago, I’d say I didn’t do too bad. I’m rather ecstatic right now, in fact. It also means that I now know what to expect if I’m going to migrate another blog.
I was planning to do a slow migration, importing things and testing things out with a seamless transition in DNS. Unfortunately, while trying to import posts from the original Blogger blog, things got messed up and the blog in Blogger became inaccessible. To make matters worse, there’s currently a problem with custom domain names in Blogger, so I couldn’t even change it back to a blogspot address. This is what I get for trying to migrate blogging platforms without changing domain names. (sigh)
Because the blog in Blogger has become inaccessible, I’m ending up prematurely making the WordPress blog public. This was done at the cost of all of the comments stored at IntenseDebate (I should have checked that they had the ability to import comments that have been exported to XML), and the sidebar is still a mess while the favicon is still missing. Apologies to everyone who lost their comments!
I just hope that any other migrations don’t have as many problems. Although with Blogger’s problems with custom domains, I don’t dare try any transitions in the meantime.
I’m going to try migrating this blog from Blogger to WordPress. If I don’t post again for awhile, then you know I’m having difficulties. If I don’t post ever again, that means the attempt failed so bad that I died. Well, maybe not that bad …
