Help! Been to a few forums, 2 chat sessions w/ Hostgator and still am lost at how to migrate my blogs to Hostgator from Blogger and WordpressDirect.
Tried different methods of going about it but to no avail. Really thought I could handle it but after 3+ hours of working on it I'm stumped.
My one blog on Blogger is on their free host and I managed to get WP going on my hostgator site and did an import but only got my posts - no theme from blogger or any widgets,sidebars,ads etc.
old blog -nostalgicheirlooms.blogspot.com
new blog - vintagecookbooksonline.com
Once I get this going I'll work on the other one. Thanks for any help
Now I'm no techie lol but I don't think you will be able to get the theme or anything else from the Blogger blog but your posts. Blogger themes don't work with WP themes as WP themes don't work on Blogger blogs (I'm pretty sure about this!).
As for the widgets, ads, etc. I would just start over fresh because you don't want to overload your blog with tons of graphics by way of ads and stuff.
Right - the import feature is for the content only. You'll need to find a theme that is close to what you had, and set that up on the new wordpress blog. You can do a search on Google for free wordpress themes.
It's basically simple to move a your blog text from Blogger to a WordPress blog. WordPress even has a special facility in it's import section for this. You will need to set your WordPress hyperlinks to match those of Blogger. You can Google "blogger to wordpress" for some tutorials, though note most of these have faults. For instance, I've found none that tell you that if your Blogger site has images, these will have to be moved by hand to the new host.
You might consider leaving your old blog posts at Blogger and starting the new one with all new material. You can direct visitors to the new blog from your last Blogger post and the Blogger sidebar. This approach gives you some immediate inlinks to the new blog and acts as promotion for it.
Also, Blogger will allow you to place your own domain name on their blog and receive traffic from both the new and old name. If you do this and keep the blog for a few months during transition, then move the domain name to your blog, you will have minimized traffic loss. Some how-tos will tell you to set up a redirect from Blogger. Blogger dislikes this and will remove your blog if you do it.
I discussed this a bit further before in another thread.
Awesome help offered by all and some good advice.
I managed to get things going and my posts, images, links all imported to the new blog set up (images imported also with no special handling) whew! None of ad stuff was moved but that's alright since the blogger one was a little overloaded.
Thanks Wade for your links they helped!
Also thanks to Lynn, Traci, Angie for giving me the courage to get it done, thanks ladies!!
Still getting used to Wordpress but it's getting clearer (and easier) since there is so much help out there.
Looking forward to more tutoring by this great group
Phil, I believe you didn't quite understand one detail. After you do the WordPress import of from Blogger, you will see your images in the new blog-- but they are not really there. The images are still hosted back at Blogger. You can check this now by right-clicking one and checking "Image Properties".
That means if Blogger shuts your blog down, the pics will disappear at your new blog as well. To have them hosted at the new blog, you have to save the images to your hard drive and then reinsert them in the new blog one-by-one.
Since it looks OK for now, there's no big hurry, but if I were you, I would start migrating over soon.
Follow what Wade is telling you and you can't go wrong. You've got to get a WordPress theme that you like, some are more customizable than others hunt around on wordpress.org or in your WordPress's(http://www.your domain goes
here/wp-admin) Wp-admin you will find Appearance(s) which is where your themes are(there should only be two at the moment Kubrick and Classic) there should also be a add new which if clicked will open a page where one can either specify what you want or check out popular, etc themes.
He is also quite correct about the images. WordPress is at the same time both drop dead easy for somethings and complicated for others.Take it slow and if you don't understand what you should do, just ask here, or on wordpress.org's support Forum, google your question, etc.
Thanks to both of you for the helpful advice.
I do have all my pictures on my hard drive, so what I think you mean is to upload them to my Wordpress admin in the Library?
That should be easy enough.
Do I need to check the link for them also in the actual post and change that too?
Also, if I redirect my blogger sites URL to my new domain will I run into problems? I have heard that blogger doesn't 'like' redirects.
Thanks again for the heads up!
Phil
OK. Good that you've got your images. Once you upload them to the WP Library or wherever you want them online, you must edit each blog entry with an image and change the image URL to it's new location. Like I say, if you have a lot of them, you may want to stagger this labor out over a time.
If you own a .com (etc) web domain name that you had pointing to the Blogger site, you should be able to redirect it to the new blog site with now problem. You do this from your name hosting service. If the Blogger name is still the free URL (http://yourname.blogspot.com) do not try to redirect it. There are scripts floating around for that purpose, but those will get you in trouble with Blogger. In this case, just post a link to your new domain as a last entry.
Sounds like the process is going well for you, though.
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