Moving from WordPress back to Blogger

I originally started this blog on Blogger and decided to move it back specifically because of the ease with which you can post via email and add twitter updates via more simple methods than what I’ve found for wordpress. I found a tool to import my WP exported xml file into Blogger, but it was by no means straightforward. So I thought I’d post some supplementary how to info for those of us with rudimentary command line skills:

• First as I mentioned above, I made an xml export of my entire wordpress blog by going to the “Manage” Dashboard page and clicking on the “Download Export File” button (54 posts = 236kb)

• Then I downloaded the aforementioned blogsync-java tool

• After reading the readme.txt included with the download, I was a little baffled, so I went to the FAQ page for blogsync to see what stupid questions fellow noobs had already asked for me. About all I could gather from this page was that because I was doing this on a Mac, I needed to edit the run.sh file instead of the run.bat file (for Windows users).

• I also figured out how to check which version of jdk (java) I was running by opening the Terminal application on my Mac (Windows users go to Start/Run, type cmd), and typing “java -version” at the “Macbook$” prompt (my home directory is Macbook, yours is whatever you named yours when you set your Mac up). Doing this felt safe and sure enough I discovered I’m running 1.5.0_13 (1.5.0_12 and above are compliant)

Macintosh:~ Macbook$ java -version

java version “1.5.0_13″

Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_13-b05-237)

Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_13-119, mixed mode, sharing)

• Then I attempted to edit the run.sh file (to “set the jdk bin path”)by opening it with textedit (Windows users open run.bat with notepad) pasting precisely what I saw on the blogsync FAQ page where I thought it should go:

export CP=./build/blogsync.jar:./lib/ws-commons-util-1.0.1.jar:./lib/xmlrpc-client-3.0.jar:./lib/gdata-client-1.0.jar:./lib/xmlrpc-common-3.0.jar

# set the parameters below and run now.

export PATH=/path/to/your/java:$PATH

java -cp $CP org.easter.blogsync.BlogSync

• This done, I then tried to figure out how to open the run.sh file from within Terminal. I successfully changed directories until I got to the directory where run.sh was located:

Macintosh:~ Macbook$ cd documents

Macintosh:documents Macbook$ cd blogsync

And then I ran it:

Macintosh:blogsync Macbook$ sh run.sh

• To my surprise a gui appeared and I managed to import my xml file using the “obvious” options (finally some “obviousness”!). Clicked on “Choose Rss” button, selected wordpress.xml export file, then changed my “to” field to 55 (I actually only imported 54 posts), clicked “Read from R…”, then clicked on the “im…” button

• But then I got this error: “cannot login to blogger account: invalid credentials”

• And it occurred to me that I had never spelled out or been given the opportunity to spell out my my blogger account credentials. I thought it would come up after hitting the import button, but instead I wound up in an endless loop of the program attempting to import, getting denied access, giving me the error such that I had to force quit the application.

• So I started digging and found the “settings.properties” file within the blogsync download folder. I opened it with textedit and sure enough this is where I could set my blogger credentials. The one piece I still wasn’t sure about was “bg.blogid=” and so I googled it and found out how to determine what my “new” blog’s ID was.

#settings

#Mon May 26 16:37:51 EDT 2008

optionRecentFrom=0

optionPostidFrom=155

optionRecentTo=6

rssFileName=

wp.password=mypwd

bg.password=yourgooglepassword

optionRecentFromRss=0

wp.username=admin

bg.username=yourusername@gmail.com

isPostidInOption=false

isPostidOption=false

optionPostidTo=160

isImportCommentRss=false

optionRecentToRss=8

isRecentOption=true

wp.url=http\://localhost/wordpress

bg.blogid=yourgoogleblogid

optionPostidIn=154,155,158

• Back to terminal to type sh run.sh and open the blogsync gui again. This time the import worked and worked rapidly and flawlessly, preserving dates and times posted, pictures and everything (except comments which I didn’t even try to import as I had exactly two for the life of my pitiful blog)

If you’ve googled your way to me, I hope this has helped, and of course now you can also find this same blogpost here!