Moving a Blog from WordPress.com to your own WordPress installation May 30, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , trackbackThere’s not a lot of documentation on how to do this, so here are the steps I took to move Camden Lady, on wordpress.com, to Camden Kiwi, on my own hosting service.
From what I’ve seen so far, you should only attempt this if you’re comfortable with ftp, basic work in the Unix shell, basic SQL, and a little general hacking. You don’t need to be an expert, just sensible, willing to give it a go, and with those basic skills. I did find myself needing to clean up via the shell when I misinstalled some plugins.
First, you need to get a hosting service, and install wordpress. I use Dreamhost, but there are many others out there. Make sure you get one that does an automatic install of wordpress, because most of them do and it saves a bit of fiddling. You also need mysql, php, some form of ftp access and a shell account.
Installing and setting up wordpress is easy and well documented, so I won’t bother with that.
The first challenge is to set up your blog in your new place, and find a theme and all the plugins you want. The themes on wordpress.com normally have links to places you can download them from. I’ve also set up plugins for the sidebar widgets, statcounter and akismet.
They were all fairly simple.
With Akismet, you will need an API key from a wordpress.com blog. That’s wierd, but it’s the way it is. Get the API key from your existing blog, and use that.
With statcounter, set yourself up on statcounter.com first, so you have all the info you need.
To copy your blog over, you need to take :
Posts - The easiest way to do this is via RSS. Increase your RSS feed size to the size of your blog. You will need to create a post to force a regeneration of the feed. Get the feed, and save it somewhere. In your new blog, use the Import tab, select RSS and give it the file in which you saved your feed. It will then update it.
I had a small problem, in that everything was imported as being written by the wrong user. To fix this, you need to go into MySQL, and run a query ‘Update wp_posts set post_author = n’ where n is found from ‘Select id from wp_users where display_name = ‘xxx” xxx is the name you want displayed. You must set up the name you want first, of course!
Links - I think this has to be done by hand.
Comments - You could possibly extract the comment feed. I’ve decided to leave them.
Images - Don’t do it. Keep your images in flickr. Its so much easier
Categories - These come automatically with the posts. If you have sub-categories, you will need to relink them to their parents via the Manage –> Categories tab.
Sidebar widgets – Any customisation of these (such as text boxes) also need to be done by hand.
This is a rather painful process, particularly because it would be very easy to do with access to the wordpress.com databases, so I hope that they’ll offer an export facility in the future.
Once you’re happy with the new blog, put a post on the old one to tell people you’ve moved. I also put a text box in the side bar so that people who enter the blog via an older post still see it. It’s a good idea to let anyone linking to you know where you’ve gone.
And there you have it – all done.
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Google…
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Thanks for the link to my WordPress StatCounter Plugin.
Great tips
Congratulations on your new digs. The site looks great. Just wanted to let you know that although your old URL (on WordPress.com) will be in the Intro to the book (after all, that’s where we got the screenshots from), we did include this new URL in the Appendix. I hope a lot of folks stop by.
And, in case you’re wondering, we’re just putting the finishing touches on the book now. It’ll go to the printer tomorrow (really!) and should be in stores by the end of the month. I promised you a copy, didn’t I? Remind me in about a month; I often forget.
Miraz may stop by to say hello, too. I told her you’d moved.
Great instructions for moving the blog.
Hi Maria – many thanks! Congratulations on getting the book into print.
There’s something mysterious happening with your blog. When I visited yesterday there was a short post from your Greek idyll. Today it’s not there. Last week when I visited, your May 30th post had disappeared, then mysteriously reappeared. I did try ‘refresh’, but it made no difference. Perhaps it’s the soup?
Not sure, and haven’t seen it myself – its certainly nothing to do with the laptop problems – this runs on servers in the USA.