finally I managed to migrate my blog from Blogger to my own WordPress installation! Yey! 🙂

A few things worth mentioning:

There are a few reasons why I wanted to migrate but the most annoying thing to me was syntax highlighting.  I’m having a lot of posts with source code and I handled that on Blogger with prettify with more or less success.

The easiest part was the WordPress installation itself. I run it on CentOS 7. Just install the required packages, create a new database and run the install script. 😉
The harder part was to find a new layout as I was not very happy with the old dark style of the blog. I ended up using “Customizr” as my theme. Having used it now for a few days I’m very happy with it but will probably need more time to customize the theme to my needs.

And then the hardest or most time consuming task: the content migration. There is a WordPress plugin for migration content from Blogger but this only copies the content and actually failed migrating the comment bodies. For the comments I ended up migrating them manually by copy & paste. I also had to modify each blog post to reflect new image URLs, new syntax highlighter, image gallery and much much more.

The most important thing was to migrate the permalinks. Blogger is generating the permalinks differently than WordPress and therefore I set up quick and dirty 301 redirects from the old permalinks to the new ones.

used plugins:

• Broken Link Checker
  • “Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.”
• Crayon Syntax Highlighter
  • “Supports multiple languages, themes, highlighting from a URL, local file or post text.”
• Regenerate Thumbnails
  • “Allows you to regenerate all thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes.”
• Simple 301 Redirects
  • “Create a list of URLs that you would like to 301 redirect to another page or site. Now with wildcard support.”
• Simple Feed Stats
  • “Tracks feeds, displays subscriber counts, custom feed content, and much more.”
• UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
  • “Backup and restore: take backups locally, or backup to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, (S)FTP, WebDAV & email, on automatic schedules.”
• Velvet Blues Update URLs
  • “This plugin updates all urls in your website by replacing old urls with new urls.”
• WordPress SEO
  • “The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.”
• WP Edit
  • “Ultimate WordPress Content Editing.”
• WP Statistics
  • “Complete statistics for your WordPress site.”
• WP User Avatar
  • “Use any image from your WordPress Media Library as a custom user avatar. Add your own Default Avatar.”
• Easy WP SMTP
  • “Send email via SMTP from your WordPress Blog”

Conclusion:

After all it was quite an effort and took me a couple of days, but I think it was worth it and I should have started with WordPress right from the beginning!