Yesterday evening, I moved Andrea’s weblog from blogger to WordPress on auroralux. She’s got her own database and install location so we don’t have to upgrade at the same time if we don’t want to.
I figured it must be a common desire to eventually want to migrate away from Blogger. I can think of lots of reasons for it, but two main reasons stood out: I wanted no questions about who owns her content and I’m too lazy to read Blogger’s EULA; and I wanted access to the web server logs.
I used two methods for the forwarding. For the Main and Archive pages, I just used a simple HTTP redirect to send the browser to the new location:
<MainOrArchivePage>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
CONTENT="1; URL=http://frickchen.auroralux.net/">
</meta>
</MainOrArchivePage>
I borrowed code to handle redirection of specific articles. The referenced snippet just searches the new site for the title of the article from the old site and displays the results.
I investigated some more complicated methods of rewriting the URLs using javascript, but didn’t make much headway before I discovered these simple solutions.
Andrea also looked through a bunch of wordpress themes; there are a lot out there but it didn’t take long to find one! The wordpress themes are usually covered under a Creative Commons license or the GPL, so it’s nice to know we’re legal using them. So far, her new theme has required slight modifications to style.css to make it work for her, but that’s another advantage of migrating: if I’m going to have to learn CSS and a blogging template system, I would rather learn only one and be able to handle both our blogs.