plugins

How to move your blog from Blogger Beta to WordPress

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Here’s how I migrated my blogger blog from Blogger Beta to WordPress on my own server. Hope it helps you if you are doing the same thing.

I’ve not included information about how to install WordPress on your server. Many hosts have tools for “one click” installation.

Between each step there should be one that says: “Check, play, fiddle, tweak, check”. Boring to repeat. Essential to do.

1.DECIDED TEMPLATE

  • Looked at some other liblogarians WordPress blogs to find formatting and functions to steal emulate.
  • Sketched what I wanted on a bit of paper.
  • Spent a couple of days trawling through WordPress themes to find one near enough.
  • Discovered iLoveMusic.
  • Fiddled with it for about a week on a test database, so that I just had to upload the plugin ready template to my new live installation.

2.DECIDED PLUGINS

  • I searched google, WordPress support and WordPress codex to find plugins to do what I wanted. I entered things like “embed YouTube” or “print pages”, rather than techie terms.
  • I followed comments on the plugin pages back to blogs that used the plugin, so I could check the plugin in action.
  • Here’s what I used:
  • Anarchy Media Player. Allows me to embed YouTube clips in my posts, or a media player to play many different file formats
  • Blogger Image Import see 5. below.
  • Simple-Recent-Comments WordPress doesn’t have code to display recent comments, so this does the trick
  • Dr Dave’s Spam Karma A must-have. After using it for 6 months on LINT, only 3 spams have got through – and they seem to be hand entered. We have up to 200 spams stopped per day.
  • Ultimate Tag Warrior Tags, tag cloud, relevant posts…and much more than I implemented.
  • WP-Print This one’s for Walt Crawford. Clicking on “print this post” strips the crap from your post and produces a short and sweet version ready for printing.

3.Posted a message on my old blog that I was fiddling about in case I accidentally flooded people’s aggregators.

4. IMPORTED POSTS AND COMMENTS FROM BLOGGER BETA TO WORDPRESS

  • i) Use the script while you can, as one small tweak from blogger and it will no longer work
  • ii) Remove the script from your server when it is finished,as it is a security risk
  • It worked like a dream. The only thing I did differently was to add a footer to the blogger RSS feed so that the imported posts indicated they were from the old version of the blog.

    • 5. IMPORTED IMAGES FROM BLOGGER BETA

    • Used Notions’ Blogger Image Import. This copies the images from the blogger server, loads them locally, then changes the links in the posts to point to the local copy.

    6. AFTER THE IMPORT – WHAT I DID

    • Checked and configured all WordPress Options.
    • Activated plugins and configured.
    • Changed any formatting from blogger.
    • Checked that the existing feeds worked OK.
    • I already had a Feedburner feed, so I changed the originating feed from my blogger feed to my WordPress one.
    • Burnt a Feedburner feed for the comments.
    • Added a “number of readers” badge to the side bar – available from Feedburner.
    • Followed the instructions at Feedburner to change the header file so that browsers autodiscover the Feedburner feeds, not the existing ones.
    • Added a sitemeter
    • I decided not to go to Bloglines and claim the feed then mark it as a duplicate of the Feedburner one, but YMMV.
    • Went to technorati and claimed the blog
    • From the WordPress dashboard, went to Options > Writing to add the ping for technorati to my blog
    • Found and embedded an appropriate Creative Commons license.
    • Used MicroAngelo to create a tiny image to use as the favicon to display in Firefox. The Gimp doesn’t create .ico files.
    • Created a favicon.ico file on the root directory where the blog was.
    • Went to any sites where I’d registered my website and changed it.

    7. Still to do:

    • Strip the arial font and purple colour I used on all blogger posts.
    • Add tags to all posts.

    Hope this helps.

    TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: New Beginning

    Embedding YouTube

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    WordPress strips the code when I try to embed a YouTube video. Their support page has one suggestion, but when I checked out the WordPress video plugins page, I found the anarchy media player.
    It’s Australian and will let me embed all sorts of video formats. Here’s how it described itself:

    Anarchy Media Player 1.6 for WordPress, WordPressMu and Standalone Javascript will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page. The WordPress versions also add buttons to the Rich Text Editor for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players.

    Sooo…I’ve downloaded the plugin and will use it to embed my “Happy Holidays” video in the next post.

    (If you pay attention to such things, you’ll notice that this post wasn’t made on my blogger blog.


    Brewing another blog beast.

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    I’m setting up an internal communications blog for our academic library using WordPress. Why?

    1. We have too many email lists for internal communications
    2. All of us are saving emails in our own subdirectories on the same server
    3. To create a searchable archive
    4. To introduce staff to RSS feeds
    5. Experimenting so that we know how to create a ridgy-didge one to talk with our users

    Image: Hubble bubble. There is no cookbook.

    We hope to have it up by Friday. FRIDAY!!!

    CW and I huddled around a PC one weekend at her house to set up LINT, so I’ve done a WordPress install before, but I’m finding out about .php, .css, ftp, plugins and the Gimp as I use them. I know I’m just learning – but I still keep beating myself up about not providing the perfect introduction to blogging bliss for the library staff.

    Because I’m not Grand Zen Master Coder, I know it won’t look exactly how I want it or do exactly what I want. I still want it to be something that people will “get”, and hopefully enjoy. When you’re asking people to change work methods, fun and enjoyment is not usually the result, so maybe I’m being a bit naive there.

    We’re replacing several email lists with the one blog, so I’ve set up categories with RSS feeds to match each list. The idea is that staff will subscribe to the categories that match the lists they already get, plus have access to all the other information whizzing about – all in a searchable archive.

    I’m using these plugins:

    • Category LiveBookmarks Plus Allows browsers to autodiscover category feeds, plus inserts an RSS icon next to the category name in the sidebar.
    • Ultimate Tag Warrior so that we can tag posts and create tag clouds.
    • Dagon Design Import Users . If you give it a file with usernames and their emails, it automatically adds them as users, creates a password and emails it to them.
    • WordPress Suicide. So I can blow away the data on the test version and upload templates etc. from the copy I’ve been working on here.
    • I’ve also added a patch, Ticket #1790: category-title-in-category-feeds.patch that inserts the category name after the blog name in the RSS title. (Pretty useless if all the feeds have the same title!)

    In another post, I’ll describe some of the decisions we needed to make in setting up the blog, just in case you’re thinking of doing the same.

    TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Action


    Imported from the earlier version of my blog that used Blogger. Commenter’s email and URLS will not show up.