New Town, Same Story

I just finished migrating from a self-hosted Wordpress site to Blogger. Apparently Wordpress expects you to pay for a custom domain while Blogger doesn't. I wanted to keep talesfromthecellar.com, but didn't want to self host anymore. Thankfully, this process wasn't too difficult, with the help of a few articles.

First, you have to get your site data out of Wordpress. I found this article, which helped me do this painlessly. From the steps in there, I now had a backup of my site, and had it converted to Blogger format for importing. But the export does not include images. That's not a big deal since you can download them yourself, but the references in the file point to the old site. Fortunately, another article shows how to use Dropbox to host your images, and then globally update the references in the converted file. That worked great as well.

There was still one more thing I had to do to complete the migration: switch the domain. For this, I found yet another article that detailed every step. It was done in about 30 minutes, and the final DNS redirect happened in less than 2 hours. YMMV.

Once the migration was complete, I had customize the appearance (this is easy in the Blogger interface), and then had some cleanup. I still had missing images on my old site due to being hacked a couple of years ago. About 30K other Wordpress users were as well. I still haven't found all my images. But that's another story. Cleanup also may be necessary for any post elements supported by plugins. I found that the video plugin I used didn't transfer, so I had to manually re-add the references to get the embedded videos to look right. And there are other custom plugins that have similar issues.

But other than a few glitches, the process went really well. Thanks to all the help from other online bloggers!