The other day, I took on a challenge for the first time. As usual, I have to blog about it.

A client of mine has (had) a Blogspot blog that she wanted transferred over to a WordPress blog. I have researched this before and didn’t find any useful information on how to do this until recently. That is not to say the information isn’t out there, you just need to use the right search criterion.

Anyway, to do this export from Blogger/Blogspot and import to WordPress you need to do a few things.

1. To start, you need to have WordPress installed and configured before you can begin.

2. Log into your WordPress Dashboard area.

3. Choose Tools > Import. On the page that appears, there are fifteen different blogging systems to choose from that WordPress has more or less automated. For this instance, click on Blogger.

Important Note: In order to proceed, you must have a Google account. If you have the old style Blogger account, you do need to upgrade to the new Google version of Blogger which is hosted on Blogspot.

4. Click link that says “Authorize.” This tells Blogger to let WordPress access your Blogger account. You will be sent back to this page after providing authorization.

5. Select the blog you want to import. Next to each blog in your Blogger account, there will be “Magic Button” that says, “Import.” Chose which blog to import and click the magic button.

6. Author Mapping. This is so that the username on your Blogger account can be matched to your username on your WordPress account.

Once you’ve completed these steps, it is all automatic.

Personally, I was surprised that it went so easily. However, I was not impressed that all (or most) formatting did not stay intact. We ended up with text and images all misaligned. When you have tons of posts, this is just too big of a job to try to correct. But on the bright side, we got all the posts to move over. I would love it if someone could tell me what more I could do to realign text and images. Please leave me a comment.

– More later

Technorati Tags: Blogs, WordPress

I am knew at installing WordPress. So, you can imagine the frustrations that I came across.

For me, I have a cPanel installation. It really is quite nice to just click a button and have it install automatically… all files and database… Installed! Cool Huh?! Yeah, well… didn’t work so easily. I ended up getting some help with the installation. After getting WordPress installed manually, my dashboard told me that I needed to update to 2.5. Hmm.

I found out that the WordPress that I had been working on can NO LONGER be upgraded with cPanel. Something, apparently got messed up with the integration between cPanel and WordPress. Great!

So, I call my tech support and beg them to help out with updating to the new version. They were glad to help out.

So now, the blog that I have installed (with a little help) won’t upload images… Oh man. Well, I did lots of lookups on the problem. First, I found out that the Permalinks has a script that it wants to add to the .htaccess, but can’t because the .htaccess is set to a 660 permission. So, I tried every combination, 777 worked best. I was able to upload images… but only once or twice. I found that when I logged out and then back in again the permissions changed on the .htaccess and WordPress still wanted permission to write to it and couldn’t.

Then I found some help in the WordPress Forums to add this script to my .htaccess:

<ifmodule mod_security.c>
<files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</files>
</ifmodule>

So now my htaccess looks like this:

<ifmodule mod_security.c>
<files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</files>
</ifmodule>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Well, I used that and it seemed to work for me, but not for my client couldn’t seem to make it work. We both use Firefox and it is the most current version.

Well, today I updated her blog again… I got tired of always changing the permissions to 777. I figure, hey maybe the most current, 2.5.1 will correct this problem. The image uploading seems to work fine for me.. but, sad to say, it doesn’t work for her.

To boot, I still have the permissions problem for the permalinks. I don’t understand why it needs to always add the same script over and over again.

Anyway, regarding the image uploads, I found this website Upload problems? Upgrade Flash that has a lot of different things to check such as what version of FLASH you’re using. So, now my goal is to find out why I can upload and she can’t.

If you have any ideas, let me know. At this point, I am out of ideas.

More later…

Technorati Tags: Blogs, WordPress