Importing Blogger Entries to Wordpress
by Mandar Vaze on December 15, 2008
in Tutorials
I imported several of my old entries from my now-defunct blog from blogger. Although, Wordpress makes it very easy to import the entire blog, considering there are two very different platforms, there were some obvious quirks.
Here are my experience, and tips for your smooth transition
The More Tag
Originally when I started using blogger, it was very primitive and it did not have the equivalent of wordpress’ more tag. One had to use a hack to be able to show only summary on first page. I had to use something like span=fullpost (sic). This caused big problems when I imported my old entries. This caused the page to look very funny, although individual entries were OK. I noticed this first in Internet Explorer. Google Chrome and Firefox were both smart enough to render the pages correctly.
Solution : After you import, go to HTML view in the blog editor (I use built-in blog editor on wordpress.com, if you use other editors, details may vary, but the principle remains the same), and remove the span tags.
Italics Tag
Blogger once again used span style:italics(sic). One of the problems with span tag is that it may interfere with other span tags. While this may not pose any problem it and of itself, I preferred cleaner approach Wordpress uses that of em tag. I manually replaced all the span style=italics tag with simple em tags.
Other Issues
There were other issues mostly related to embedded images. Again, this did not cause any visible problem. But I think Wordpress’ implementation is far better. These issues also attribute to my being new to blogging few years ago. (Hopefully) I’ve learned a thing or three since I started using wordpress.
