How to import a BlogSpot blog into WordPress
May 8, 2008 by ourtimes
If you have a blog at blogspot.com and decide to switch your hosting to wordpress.com you can import all the posts and comments by using the WordPress Import feature. The automated process also has import functions for LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad, or another WordPress blog hosted elsewhere.
I’ve used this process for Blogger but not the others. Although all the posts and comments get transferred, widgets in the sidebar are ignored. You would have to re-create those from scratch.
To start the process go to the WordPress admin area and choose
Manage > Import. Then choose which blogging system you want to import from. To use the importer with Blogger you must have a Google account and an upgraded blog. If you have an old-style Classic template you will need to switch to the new Blogger system.
Step 1 - Authorize the transfer:
It would be helpful to login to your Google Account before you begin the import process. Then you can simply click the “Grant access” button and continue.
Step 2 - Select a blog to import:
If you have more than one blog attached to a single Blogger account all of them will be listed with an “Import” button for each blog. The example below shows just one.
Step 3 - Author mapping:
On Blogger you have one username, and on WordPress another username. The author mapping process allows you to establish an association between the two usernames.
Once these 3 steps have been completed the import proceeds automatically.
WordPress.com advantages:
The list of features in which Worpdpress.com outshines Blogger is quite long. They are summarized in this table: WordPress vs. BlogSpot. There are even more plus points for WordPress.com:
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Quite a few Blogger widgets added after 2006 depend on JavaScript. They won’t show up in many types of mobile device or browsers in which JavaScript is disabled. Google services rely heavily on client-side scripts which add significantly to download times. Outside towns and cities in America, Europe, and wealthy countries in South East Asia, broadband penetration has been minimal. Elsewhere, it’s confined to major cities. A 2007 article in PC World magazine noted that Rural America is doomed to Dial-Up. It looks like Google Inc. only cares about catering to city slickers in prosperous nations.
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Since before Blogger-in-Beta was launched Google has ignored some quite basic features requested by users in the “Features and Suggestions Wish List”. No static pages, no post excerpts and no ‘import’ feature. But the development team have spent a lot of time on script-dependent widgets and gadgets for the sidebar. Someone should remind them that content is king, not gimmicks. Widgets are nice, but it it looks like they’ve got their priorities wrong.
http://help.blogger.com/?page=wishlist
- Photo bloggers get a better deal with WordPress.com. In posts, you can add a photo gallery with a single tag, and a Monotone Photoblogger Theme was added in April 2008. The Blogger alternative is to add a Slideshow widget to display thumbnails from Picasa Web Albums, which are unusable without JavaScript in any case.
WordPress.com disadvantages:
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I got fed up with a constant stream of spam comments for deletion in my WordPress dashboard. Especially as there were very few genuine comments for moderation. It’s true that if you ignore the Akismet spam queue they’ll be deleted automatically after a while, but it’s difficult to ignore them as a few might have been falsely tagged as spam.
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Blogger makes it easy to change fonts and colors in themes. At WordPress.com you have to pay for an upgrade before you can do that.
- It has been said elsewhere, but the dashboard Blog Stats really don’t compare to the free tracker scripts available from SiteMeter and StatCounter. The graph looks nice, but it’s done with Flash® so you can’t right-click to save it. The SiteMeter PNG-format bar chart looks great and includes a table of visits and page views for each day of the month. WordPress doesn’t identify the search engines which sent visitors and Search Engine Terms are cropped at 40 characters. I understand that unrestricted third-party scripts could be a security risk, but it should be possible to allow users to enter account parameters and generate safe code on the server. The StatCounter team would love to cooperate. They wrote about it on their blog:
For security reasons wordpress don’t allow you to install javascript code on blogs hosted by them i.e. wordpress.com blogs. We’re sure though that, if enough of you request the full StatCounter code on your wordpress.com blogs, then Matt & Co would be happy to oblige! We would certainly be happy to work with wordpress on this.
http://blog.statcounter.com/?p=49
