I have finally migrated from using Blogger as my blog engine to using WordPress. I used Blogger to edit and publish my posts which were then published on my self-hosted domain at per.lausten.dk via FTP. However, Blogger did not provide all the features that WordPress offers – I therefore decided to migrate to WordPress.

My blog runs on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0. I followed a guide by Jason Boche with some modifications in order to be able to import my blog posts from Blogger to WordPress:

1. I installed MySQL 5.1.30 and MySQL GUI Tools 5.0.R15 and created my WordPress database
2. I installed openSSL Light 0.9.8j (needed for WordPress to import from Blogger – see below)
3. I installed PHP 5.2.8 and selected the IIS ISAPI module and added the MySQL, MySQLi and openSSL extensions during the installation
4. I changed the NTFS permissions, installed WordPress 2.7 and added index.php to the list of default content pages in IIS

WordPress can import blog posts from Blogger – but only from blogspot hosted blogs. Since I used the FTP option to publish my posts on my own domain I had to switch from FTP to BlogSpot (via Publishing Settings) in order to allow WordPress to import. Furthermore, WordPress required openSSL to be installed and added as extension in PHP. I was then able to import all my 166 blog posts and the related 106 comments (and I could then delete the Blogger created HTML files from my site).

Using Blogger to publish posts via FTP creates a HTML file for each post and these post permalinks are already in the search engine indexes. So I was interested in maintaining the permalink structure of /year/month/post-name.html. To achieve this I used the WordPress plugin “Maintain Blogger Permalinks” that updates the permalink to match the Blogger permalink structure. Furthermore, IIS has to be setup to use a custom 404 header in order to redirect incoming request for the .html permalink to the matching post in WordPress.

My blog was then migrated and I have now started to explore the many possibilities of WordPress such as themes and plugins.