Tag Archives: Blogs

Google needs to do something about the import feature of Blogger

Google has this great blogging platform in Blogger but they are hardly doing anything to make it easy for people to switch from rival blogging platforms to theirs.

I mean they do a pretty good job at data liberation. It is very easy to migrate from Blogger to WordPress but doing a reverse is a major headache.

WordPress too makes it very easy to export your blog content to a XML file. Blogger has a feature that accepts an XML file for importing blogs. But the two formats are incompatible.

There is a third party service available that converts WordPress XML file to Blogger XML file but it does not support files larger than 1MB in size. And most of the times the file exported is not even accepted by Blogger.

The new Blogger is a pretty solid alternative to WordPress and Google would probably attract a lot of people from WordPress if only they offer a solid importing tool.

WordPress is a great blog software migration platform!

I just realized how useful WordPress is even if you have no plans to use it as your blogging platform.

I was working on migrating a Posterous powered blog to Blogger.

Posterous does not have any export feature. Though they do offer an API for other services to fetch content from it.

Blogger does not have an importer for Posterous. They just support imports from an XML file.

WordPress was the tool recommended by the web. A Posterous import add-on is available that is pretty fabulous I would have to admit. It imported posts, comments and even images.

Exported an XML file from WordPress. This file does not directly import into Blogger but there is an online tool available that converts the XML file from WordPress to Blogger format. And it was done.

In my case however, the import of images did not really work well. Probably because I was using a WordPress MU blog for the migration. Images were supposedly imported but they were not working. The export file links to the images stored on the server so Blogger also linked to the same images. This became a small headache. Did some manual editing and it all worked out well.

Would like to add here why I decided to switch a Posterous hosted blog to Blogger. Two major reasons… Flexibility and Speed. Blogger gives you much more power in controlling what you want to run on your blog compared to Posterous. It is also much faster than Posterous.

Posterous WordPress Switch feature does not seem to work at all

Update: Looks like they have way too many migrations in queue!


@Sushubh ok – got it. He’ll take care of you. Migrations are pretty backed up right nowless than a minute ago via webRich Pearson
richiepear

I have been trying to port a WordPress blog over to Posterous for almost a week now.

Posterous highlight this feature recently and even showcased some strong points on why you should migrate your blog over from WordPress to their platform.

Now, I am not prepared to switch this blog to Posterous but it does feel alright for some other blogs.

I have tried completing their ‘wizard‘ several times already. I do not get any confirmation after the process is done.

The service is supposed to send me an email alert when the migration is complete on their servers. No emails.

I contacted their help who said that the process can take a couple of hours. It has been 3-4 days already. No updates.

Contacting them on Twitter also does not seem to get any response. Just a plain disappointment.