Blog Migration

By Dr Chris P. Jobling

In my move from Blogger.com to this self-hosted WordPress there are a couple of things that I have had to do that I thought would be worth documenting. These fall into the general headings of Comments, Permalinks, Feeds, and Categories and Tags.

  1. Comments. I was using disqus.com as my commenting system. There’s a WordPress plugin for this but to move the threads to the new blog I had to use the URL mapping method. See Using the Migration tools from the disqus knowledge base.
  2. Permalinks. I prefer the rich permalinks to the default http://blog.cpjobling.me/?p=2 format. Plus they are closer to the permalinks used in Blogger.
  3. Feeds. I was using feedburner on my previous blog to manage my feeds. I added the Fd Feedburner Plugin to redirect my atom and comments feeds to feedburner.
  4. Categories and tags. When I transferred my posts from blogger.com (using the WordPress Blogger to WP tool) tags from blogger became categories in WordPress. I’ve been swapping these over gradually, but I have an awful lot of uncategorized posts to go over! The nice thing about WordPress categories is that if you are careful, you can arrange the main topics of your site into easy to find high-level headings. Each category can be a top-level menu item. So far I’ve got Blog, Tools, Teaching, Courses, Podcasts, Research and Free Time.

I’ll post more on this topic as I come across things worth reporting.