So how did I get here?

I’ve gotten some questions on how I went about migrating from Blogsphere to WordPress, so I wanted to share here in case someone else was in the same boat.

Basically I stood on the shoulders of others.  I followed the directions laid out by Mitch Cohen in these blog posts here and here.  He used some code from our mutual friend Matt White to export the posts and comments into a format that WordPress can use.  Another friend of his had some code that cleaned things up, and then I simply imported everything.

For me, categories didn’t quite come over correctly, so I deleted them all and started over.  I decided to manually go through and clean everything up after the fact.  It’s still something I need to finish up.

As for comments, they did come over, but I wanted to use Disqus instead.  Disqus is a good service for comments that allow people to login with various accounts like Facebook or Twitter.  Pulls in the avatars and everything.  So, I installed the Disqus WordPress plugin and now suddenly all of my comments were gone on the blog and replaced with blank Disqus areas.  Well no fear, you can simply export your comments from WordPress into Disqus using the Disqus tools and then they all show up.

The URL’s to the emoticons got converted to text only, so you’ll have to go back and edit those if you need to as well.  Otherwise it just looks a little messy.

Next, I always used FeedBurner for my RSS feeds, so I just pointed it to the new feed here and I was done.

I’ve added some plug-ins like Jetpack and WordPress Mobile, but I’m still looking for other good additions.  Also, I need to find a nice theme I like as the default one (while easily readable) needs some style…

One last cool thing I did was import some REALLY old Blogger based blog posts.  You see, I had written a private blog for awhile before going public and using Blogsphere.  I still had them in Blogger and it was easy to export to a format for bringing into WordPress.  It was kind of nice to see the old diary entries and incorporate them into the overall blog here.

Anyway, I hope that helps you out if you are in the same boat.  It was really a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, so don’t be scared of diving in!