Blogger 2 WordPress Conversion Procedure:

Welcome to my new According to Jim WordPress website look.

By now, most folks have probably heard about the end of life support for FTP publishing via the Blogger online system of being able to post directly to your own server using FTP publishing. Blogger has a FTP migration solution to transfer your FTP blog, and move it to a custom subdomain or even a blogspot.com address if you so desire. See: FTP Migration Tool Released for information and a video on how to do the Blogger FTP switch. I have used the tool on some FTP blogs, and it does work. However, I wanted to do something different here.

Welcome to my Blogger converted to WordPress blog with FTP migration changes.

This is a writeup about the procedure, tips, pitfalls, and what needs to be done for everything to work right when converting from Blogger FTP publishing to WordPress publishing.

Blogger to WordPress Conversion Criteria for Everything to Function Properly

• Switch to WordPress from Blogger FTP publishing.
• Make sure file names (including archives, labels, and posting pages) were the same from the old system to the new WP system.
• New blog must be SEO friendly and maintain Google PageRank.
• Set up .htaccess redirects for seamless intergration with new WordPress categories vs Blogger labels.
• Support for PHP “includes” for file pages.
• Allow for any type of file naming convention (i.e.: .htm, .html, or .php) at the old file names to the new file names and must be seamless from the old to the new.
• Blog posting must also include all original comments.
• Be able to merge two or more blogs together in one new WordPress blog.
• And, last but not least, as if I have to say this, the new WordPress blog must work.

Below is the process I used for converting to a WordPress blog.

Suffice it to say, there was a fair amount of work involved with the conversion.

I have to say at this point, the WordPress blogging platform is a very powerful tool. It also can be somewhat intimidating for someone to first install and use it.

Step One: Create a WordPress blog on your website.

There are a couple of things to consider when initially setting up a WordPress blog directly on your own server for the first time. If you already have an FTP blog using Blogger to a subdirectory (i.e. yoursite. com/blog) or are using the naked domain name (i.e. yoursite.com) as the FTP blog posting area for all your postings, or even multiple blogs on the same domain name with Blogger, then you will need to consider a few things before stepping forward.

In my particular case I had a number of subdirectories prior to installing a WordPress blog on my website. Since I did not have a subdirectory called “blog” I decided to install WordPress into that directory. There were two main benefits to installing it in a subdirectory. This provided a work in progress design area for creating and customizing the blog, without it affecting any of my other content on the website. This also turned into what was a major plus for the future, with an quick and easy option to make it the main website, without having to reinstall the WP blog at the root level. I’ll go into more detail with this later.

To create the blog, is very easy if you have a “cPanel” hosting provider. cPanel hosting is my favorite, because of the powerful tools available to users and webmasters. For example, most cPanel hosting providers have installed the Fantastico De Luxe software script that makes installing WordPress easy. Fantastico also makes it a breeze installing over 50 other programs such as, web content management systems, shopping carts, wikis, various blog open source software, photo sharing, surveys, and other cool software too. If you don’t have Fantastico from your hosting provider, and they do not automatically include WordPrss in the hosting package, then you will need to install WordPress manually. You can go to the WordPress website for more information and detailed direction on how to do that.

Step Two: Customization of the WordPress Blog

Once the WordPress blog is created on your sever, it is at a level that is a very basic installation but fully functional. There is a first posting created for you along with a generic template. You can use the template if you wish, but most folks will want a cool customized template, suited to their own tastes. There are thousands of WordPress templates available for free at the WordPress website or other websites online. You can even download a number of different templates and upload them to your server, and switch from one to the other with a template selection button. However, once you settle on a particular template, then you will probably want to stick with that one, because ultimately you will have more WP template customizations that you will do.

Step Three: Import Blogger Postings and Comments

First thing to do before messing with your Blogger blog is to export a backup XML file from the Blogger settings tab in the blog administrative panel. Do this first, because you will actually need this XML file later for the comments import.

The reason to import your old FTP Blogger postings is so you can eventually turn the original Blogger blog hosted on your own server, and redirect or make it so all the WordPress postings’ file names are the same as the orignal Blogger FTP postings. WordPress has an import tool that I thought was going to be the perfect tool to do the job of importing not only the postings from Blogger, but also the comments too. However, there was a problem with the importing of the comments. The WordPress import did not import all the comments. Before I go into the details on the issue with the comments, I need to point out what I did to even allow importing of the postings to the WordPress blog to begin with.

Blogger provides a FTP Blogger Migration Tool and FAQs for conversion of FTP blogs hosted on your own server, to Blogger hosted, either with a .blogspot.com subdomain name or a Custom Domain name (i.e. blog.yoursite .com). I would suggest reading that in detail to decide which way you wish to go and before clicking the FTP Migration tool in your Blogger Dashboard area.

As far as the WordPress importing postings, you need to know that you can not import directly from a FTP published blog using the WordPress import tool. It requires you to switch your blog to a blogspot.com subdomain name or yoursite custom domain name. Since I was not sure the WordPress solution was going to work for me, I still wanted the option of using the Blogger FTP Migration tool and migrating to a custom domain name permanently for writing my online articles in the future.

In my case, what I did was essentially make it so the Blogger FTP Migration would only go part way to fully completing the migration switch to my own custom domain at: abc.jimwarholic.com. I blocked Blogger from republishing the new updated meta redirected files and not letting the system automatically upload them to my server by changing the password at the Blogger administrative publishing settings tab to the wrong value. I think that is the first time I ever entered the wrong value for a password on purpose. This stopped the full migration process at the point of updating the old postings with meta redirects included in the postings. At that point in the migration process, I was provided a link to the ZIP file to download, with all of the updated files that I could manually upload to my server if I ever wanted to do that in the future. I also did not want a double content SEO penalty at abc.jimwarholic.com, so I included the following meta tag in the header section of the new blog only, to prevent the search engines from cataloging my content at the new abc.jimwarholic.com website. If you want to see how this code looks in the header section of my ABC website, click my ABC link and select view source code from your browser menu area. Also read about this at the Google Webmaster Help area online. Here is the code that I entered in the new blog:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

This provided me a safe place, and reachable online, to keep my old postings banked while I updated my main website at www.jimwarholic.com. Also note that the old original files were still sitting on www.jimwarholic.com during this whole WP conversion process and were still functional to the point that the information could be fully navigated to from the external and internal links, and the search engine results pages.

Once the old blog information was converted to the new Blogger Custom Domain name website, I was able to do a importing of the blog postings from the new website to my WordPress blog that resided at www.jimwarholic.com/blog. This however, is only half the battle. Blogger typically truncates the original blog posting file name (based on the title of the the original post) and leaves out smaller words at times in the file name. Before you do any importing of blog postings, you need to switch from the default WP file type Permalink Settings i.e. http://jimwarholic.com/?p=123 and need to turn on Custom Structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.php if you had PHP file names or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html if you had HTML ending file names. The WP importing tool looks at the title of the article and creates a new file name with that title, but does not use the original blog file names. I then uploaded a PHP script to my blog directory that automatically converted it to the original file names. Take a look at these two articles for more details on the cool PHP script for easy file conversion from the old to the new and more details on the Blogger to WordPress migration process:

• Moving From Blogger To WordPress – Maintaining Permalinks, Traffic & SEO
• Migrating a blog from Blogger to WordPress

Now, I had my file names the same, but some of my comments were missing in some of the postings that were imported. There seems to be some sort of glitch that some folks are experiencing when importing the postings directly from the blog using the WordPress importing tool. WordPress does not provide the option of importing from the XML exported file from Blogger, but there is a workaround. Once I had the file names exactly the same way I wanted them from the past, I then used another tool at http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com to convert the saved exported Blogger XML file from the top of Step #3 into a WordPress WXR export file that can be understood by the WordPress blog import button.

You might ask, why didn’t I just use the Blogger 2 WordPress tool to begin with? Well, that is a good question, and there are a number of reasons why it was not the ideal importing solution to begin with. First off, the export/import using the Blogger 2 WordPress tool was only effective at getting all the comments and postings into the new WordPress blog. It however had difficulty with the conversion and importing of Flash files within postings, and it also did not import a custom meta tag for original file names. Since there was no reference for the original file names, there was no way to run a script automatically to quickly change the file names on these imported postings. So, what I did was go through and edit the file names manually on the ones that had the comments, and then deleted the other imported postings that were duplicates.

Yes, this all took some time to do, and it requires a bit of critical thinking skills to keep track of what is what and where is it. It helps to use two windows and do side by side comparisons. Sometimes I had to copy the entire posting from one copy to the other that had all the comments, but might have been corrupted with the Flash internally in the post itself. Other times, I had to change the file name of the one I  did not want, to make the one I did want, the same as what was there to begin with. I know this sounds a bit confusing but the WordPress file system will not let you have two files with the same name.

Step Four: Creating Custom .HTACCESS Files and Redirects

I would like to give a special thank you to Alistair MacDonald and his article on Blogger to WordPress Migration. His insights were invaluable, along with his published .htaccess files were quite helpful in getting a handle on this part of the project.

Now that I had all the post files ending the same way and structured with a .php or .html file name for the postings, I needed to address the archives, labels (Blogger has labels) and categories (WordPress has categories, and also tags and pages). Also, keep in mind that at this step of the process, when you are about to begin switching things on and making them live, it is a good idea to have a complete backup of all of our public_html files from the website. You can use a standalone FTP program or even use a browser based cross-platform FTP like FireFTP for completely backing up your server files to your local disk.

This is where things start to get a bit more interesting. Remember that I mentioned in the beginning of this Blogger FTP to WordPress posting, that I created the WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “blog”? Well, I wanted to make the blog live at the root directory and for online readers to arrive at and navigate from the root. I did not want to have the subdirectory “blog” in my postings, labels/categories, archives, tags, and separate page file names.  A really cool feature of a WordPress installation is that it can be quickly changed to make it as though it is installed at the root of the website, without having to actually install it at the root level, while still keeping all WP files in the directory where it was originally installed. What I did, was basically follow the following WordPress article backwards for setting up a WordPress blog in its own directory. It required toggling how it was published from the WP settings area and uploading a change to the .htaccess file on the server.

The following directions are very important to follow when toggling where WordPress files are being published online, as in being displayed, and where all the WordPress files are located. This is taken from the WordPress information link above with a few clarifications:

• #7. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file.
• #8. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
• #9. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
  require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
  to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
  require(‘./yourdirectory/wp-blog-header.php’);
• #10. Login to the new location. It might now be http://example.com/yourdirectory/wp-admin/
• #11. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)
• In my case, the “yourdirectory” is: “blog” i.e. www.jimwarholic.com/blog . This is where the WordPress files are located, but the files are actually displayed without the “blog” directory being displayed at the root of the website. The root of my website is where the index.php file is located.

This is what the index.php file looks like:

/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/**
* Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
*
* @var bool
*/
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true);

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require(‘./blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

Once I performed that process above, I then pasted the following into my .htaccess file at the root level of the website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

These rewrite conditions above effectively rewrite all the blog files to the root level of the website.

To get the labels that are in Blogger to automatically redirect to the categories in WordPress required the implementation of a couple of special things. I suggest you read Alistair MacDonald’s article on Blogger to WordPress Migration. It wasn’t absolutely necessary that the old labels be exactly the same file names, but I wanted the old label files to be redirected or renamed to “category” names.

The archive files were similar to the label files, in that they also needed to be redirected to the proper areas regardless of the file names within links online or the search engines. While the posting file names were important to remain the same, due to the number of postings I had online, I did not think it was quite as important to have the archives and the categories match exactly to the old file names.

Using the procedure on the .htaccess files I learned from Alistair MacDonald, I did the following. I first created an empty labels and archives folder (directories) in the root level (public_html area) of my website because that is where the original ones were stored from Blogger FTP. Before I created those folders at the root level, I changed the original folder names that still had the original Blogger written files, to labels-o and archives-o. Now that I had my empty folders, I then created separate .htaccess files and placed them into the previously created labels and archives directories using my cPanel File Manager. Once those were created, I then placed the following modified code for my website that Alistair had first written.

Labels: Here is what I added to the labels .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.(.*)?$ category/$1/ [R=301,L]

What this does is basically changes any labels file that someone clicks on online, and converts it to a category file at my WordPress blog.

For example the following link: http://jimwarholic.com/labels/apple.php, becomes: http://jimwarholic.com/category/apple when clicked on.

Archives: Here is what I added to the archives .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_(.*)$ /$1/$2/ [R=301,L]

What this .htaccess file does is take the year and month of the archives and rewrites them to the root level with the following format: http://jimwarholic.com/2007/06. Notice that the archives file does not have the ending .php file name as the Blogger FTP published files, because WordPress creates the archives files by default with no file type at the end.

I also redirected the old RSS and Atom subscript feeds to the new feed file format.

RewriteRule ^atom\.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]

At this point in time, I was ready to write this blog posting.

By the way, I also imported some blog postings from another blog I had hosted in another subdirectory on this domain name. It was a smaller blog, with less postings, but I also did some special .htaccess file creation over at that other directory to redirect those postings directly here.

Yes, there are a few more template customizations that I intend to do for this WordPress blog but for the most part, I think I got it the way I want. I have also loaded some cool WordPress plugins that are really helpful for doing some special functions. I’ll have to write another posting on those a bit later. Feel free to tell me what you think of my new blog layout and post your comments here. You may also post your how-to questions here or send me an email.

I hope this has been beneficial to anyone looking for the procedure on how to convert from a Blogger FTP published blog to a WordPress self hosted published blog. While this information is mainly to convert to WordPress from Blogger FTP, most of the information can also be utilized in the future for importing postings from other blogs to a WordPress blog. Besides that, I can refer to this information myself in the future. Reference notes are always nice to have. Online blogging after all, is much better than taking notes the old fashioned way, and helps everyone find the information out semantically too.

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Regards,

Jim

PS If you come upon any glitches in my site, please let me know. Thank you very much for your input.

This is a how to guide for importing and exporting your Blogger blog to other Blogger blogs. Carefully follow the import and export online documentation below. Procedure works for Blogger Classic (HTML), Blogger FTP Publishing, Blogger New (XML), and Blogger Custom Domain Names.

On my online post for Blogger Dashboard – Hide Show All Problems – Missing Blogs; as of 12/14/2008 I discovered a do-it-yourself fix for this peculiar dashboard problem. I made a discovery when doing some Google Searches for free blog editors for Blogger that started me thinking of a possible solution for my particular missing blog in the dashboard problem.

I found this one article that talked about the new features of Blogger Beta, with one of those features being that of importing blog postings from other blogs that a person owns and has the publishing rights to. Other blog platforms such as WordPress have for some time been able to import postings from other blogs, but until recently Blogger did not provide that feature. When I read the write up about this new Blogger feature, it was the old proverbial light bulb going off in my head. I thought, this might be a solution to the missing blog in the dashboard.

Some background information is required for understanding the Blogger technical problem to begin with. When I first created this blog, www.jimwarholic.com, and posted it the first time on the Internet, I believe I did it strictly under FTP publishing, and did not assign a Blogspot.com to the blog at first. I created the website, www.jimwarholic.com back in the year 2006, and started publishing directly with FTP publishing at my webhosting domain using my own domain name.

It was the later part of the third quarter of 2008 in which Blogger did an update to their system, and my blog disappeared completely from the dashboard area. It wasn’t in the hidden mode, or the cookies were not causing it to be hidden as some suggested, it was just gone. I could still gain access to it from the quick edit buttons when logged into my Blogger account, and navigate backwards into the back end of the template settings and publishing setups. I tried everything I could think of to get it to show up in the dashboard, though it was always displayed on my profile page. I assigned another email address for writing on the blog as an administrator. However, the blog would not even show up at the dashboard of the other profile account. I was scratching my head for months on trying to figure it out. I posted information at Blogger Help Groups. I searched online for solutions. I tried to leave a message for Blogger, but they no longer have a contact page online. But, I could not find a fix, that is until 12/13/2008 – 12/14/2008 rolled around.

Sometimes you have to take Internet matters into your own hands. Importing and exporting blogs to Blogger is now a mouse click away on the settings area of each blog control console. You now have three options available to you. Import a blog, export a blog, and delete a blog. To import posts and comments from a Blogger blog, you must first have exported the blog to your local computer desktop or folder on your PC.

I must warn you here. Take some precautions before you attempt to export and do an import of your complete postings and comments from another blog, especially the blogs that are missing from the Blogger Dashboard area. Note also, that if you export your content from one Blogger account, and then import your postings and comments to another Blogger account, with a different name on it, you will end up having all your posts republished with the new Blogger account name.

Additionally, I would recommend before doing the online procedure is having two windows open in your browser, or better yet, having two different browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer) open when exporting a blog from one Blogger account, and importing it to another Blogger account.

*Very important note here. It is highly recommended to have an Internet quick link from your desktop to the old Blogger missing dashboard blog, to that blog’s setup page. To do this, you can use Google Chrome, and create what is known as “create an application shortcut” to your desktop. Once you do that, then you can click on the Internet link in the future to gain access to your blog. Or you can use Firefox and drag the tab to the desktop to the specific page for the postings, settings, and template area of the old blog that has been navigated to with the quick edit links in the postings themselves. You could also do a bookmark or Internet Explorer favorite link too. However, I would not trust just one way only. If you do not do this link step, you will have no way of getting back to the old Blogger blog that remains hidden from the dashboard area. You will be lost forever. The reason for this is that once you publish using the new blogspot.com address, and then change it to your old FTP published address and click publish, your quick links will now be linked to the new blog instead of the old blog. Which means the old quick links used to navigate to the settings tab for the old blog will not work anymore.

Here is what I did for my particular FTP export and import blog solution.

This procedure is written for Blogger FTP publishing but most of these steps should work for other non FTP blogs such as blogspot.com address and custom domain names for Blogger too. The new XML Blogger template files can also be exported and imported too and you should export your HTML Blogger Classic template or XML template file too.

1. First read the Blogger information on, How do I import and export blogs on Blogger? Read it twice and make sure you comprehend all aspects of how to do it before proceeding.
2. Created favorites – bookmarks, and quick launch buttons using Firefox and Google Chrome on the desktop to the old blog setup page to be safe.
3. Saved old HTML template file on to my local computer from the old blog website. I used the following procedure for saving the old template file. Opened Template, Edit HTML, and copied entire html text to a notepad plain text file. Notepad is part of the default Microsoft Windows Operating System simple text editor programs available from the lower left of the screen. Go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, Notepad – and Don’t forget to do this and remember where you have saved the file!
4. Opened Firefox and Google Chrome Browsers next to each other. It’s nice to have a bigger screen, but not required.
5. Logged into one Blogger account in Firefox. Logged into the other Blogger account in Google Chrome. Though I used two different Blogger accounts, you can do the same thing with a single Blogger account and have two windows, tabs, or two web browsers open at the same time with the same Blogger account but with different blogs in each tab or window.
6. Navigated to the control area of the blog, using the quick edit links in the old blog postings, and followed the links to the settings tab for the old blog.
7. Exported the old blog to the desktop or folder on your computer’s hard drive which creates a (.xml) file.
8. Created new Blogsopt.com webblog. Went to the other browser, and created a new Blogspot address using the “Create a Blog” link from the Blogger Dashboard. I used http://internetjim.blogspot.com as the blogspot.com website. You can create your own name for your blogspot.com website. Note, it is going to change to your own domain name in the next steps.
9. Verified the new virgin site was live online. (I may have done one test posting to begin with, but am not sure on this point.)
10. Changed the new site title and description to reflect the name of the old blog. Note: I changed the title slightly to quickly visually verify on which website I was on at the time. Because, once you do the import of the posts, comments, and HTML template file, you will not be able to tell the difference from one blog to the other.
11. Switched to FTP publishing on the new blog by first switching back to classic templates mode.
12. Opened both the old and the new blog tab areas and copied the FTP publishing information from one settings are to the other. Went right down tabs: Basic, Publishing, Formatting, Comments, Archiving, Site Feed, Email, OpenID, and Permissions. It is important to get everything the way it is on the old blog to the new blog. Keep the publishing, archiving, and site feed absolutely the same, otherwise, you could end up with new urls, which won’t match up with the search engine results or result in broken links back to your website.
13. Copied from the HTML text in the Notepad template file previously saved in step number 3 and pasted the old HTML text into the new Edit HTML section of the new blog. (This makes the new blog look like your old blog, but not completely until you publish FTP publish it. Important! Don’t publish it yet. Wait till the next step. If you publish before the next step, you will write over all your postings at the hosting server for your blog for a period of time until you repost with the imported posts and comments.)
14. After double checking and comparing all of the settings with the old to the new, it was now time to do an import from the saved (.xml) file located on the computer desktop. Note, there are a couple of options on the import. You can either choose to import and automatically publish all posts immediately or import and save them as drafts to be published later. Your choice at this point. I automatically published at this point in the import process.
    
    

    Import posts and comments from a Blogger export file. Imported posts will be merged with any current posts, sorted by date.

15. Success! At this point in time, I verified all my posts were properly posted to the server. I navigated to each online to verify. The new blog was now showing up in the dashboard area.

Blogger Notes and Observations

I was still trying to figure out how my blog went missing in the first place. I still think it had to do with when I first created the blog without a blogspot.com address. I went straight to FTP publishing. Another possibility, is I may have created this blog at about the time Blogger still allowed you to use a different email address or Blogger account name other than a Gmail account. Blogs under the old Blogger accounts required a different login screen and are part of the legacy claim for claiming old blogs to be part of your new Google account name. I had however, claimed my blog under this legacy link a long time ago.

Somehow, when the most recent changes occurred with the Blogger Dashboard area, was when I first noticed my blog had disappeared. It seems as though a few other folks have experienced the same problem too. I haven’t heard of a fix from Google as of yet about this particular situation. It may be part of a database glitch for old FTP blogs that were created without a blogspot.com address to begin with that got overlooked when Google Engineers updated the Blogger system and dashboard areas.

Another important point to note when doing an import from one blog to the other, is that if you posted any of your old posts at the old blog account, and then changed the title of the blog postings and re-published the blog at the same spot, the URL would not have changed on this old posting, but when you import the blog postings into a new Blogger blog, the URL is updated to reflect this change. That change in the URL creates a small problem however.

Let’s take a look at a web page example. Let’s say I published a blog at the old account titled “This Is a Test Example” for the title of a new article. The URL at the old account would be the following: www.jimwarholic.com/2007/02/this-is-a-test-example.php. If however you changed the title at the old blog to “Internet Testing at My Online Sandbox Beach” or simply “Test” the new title in the Blogger Title Field would be updated on the old blog posting, but the URL would remain the same. This would not affect any links to that particular posting. But, when you import the name, “Internet Testing at My Online Sandbox Beach” or “Test” for the title of the posting to the new blog, the resulting URL would change to www.jimwarholic.com/2007/02/test.php, which is completely different than the original URL and will break hyper-links to that specific page, unless you create some permanent redirects (301 Status Code) in your (.htaccess) file. If your website hosting provider provides the easy-to-use cPanel website control panel for setting up redirects, or other website hosting control panels that provide for quickly configuring permanent (301) redirect solutions, then each URL can be quickly entered into an online input form. Otherwise, you must manually write a new .htaccess file by including the redirects for each particular file that needs to be redirected to the new URLs. Once the redirects are established online, after a period of a month or two, then you can remove them to make your website run more efficiently, and speed up the web page renderings. I suggest a search on Google for more information on .htaccess files to understand some of the finer points in configuring temporary (302) and permanent (301) redirects.

For the moment, I am a bit leery of deleting the old blog by using the “Delete Blog” from the settings page. However, I changed the FTP publishing user name and password, so it would not publish if I accidentally happened to click there for some reason. I also gave myself a note on the HTML template area to reflect what the status of that blog is. I might have missed a redirect, and if I saw an old page and thinking it needed to be edited, the old edit quick edit link will still be in affect for the old online posting. You would not want to republish from that old blog, otherwise you will change all your Internet postings back to what they were in the past.

I know this is a rather long Blog posting, but I feel it’s important for everyone out in Internet land to understand what is going on online with your web site, when a procedure like this is implemented on the Web.

Good luck everyone. If you happen to take the plunge into importing and exporting, take your time, and think about what you are doing. Print out these instructions if you wish. Feel free to post your comments or questions to either the comments section of this post or email me directly using the appropriate comment or email form below.

Best regards,

Jim

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Blogger Import Export Blog Update 12/18/08

After serious consideration about a few things related to possibly maintaining the old blog online, I decided it was in my best internet interest to delete the old blog completely from the Blogger system. There were a number of very good reasons not to save the old blog. For one, if I forgot to do a redirect of an old Blogger posted page, a commentator would still be able to post a new comment to the old blog. This would not be good, since all the old comments were exported and imported into the new online blog, and I really want people to comment on the new blog, not the old blog. Additionally, I found myself accidentally logging in to the old blog through quick edits, on web pages that I forgot about. By deleting the blog completely from the Blogger system, I will no longer have to worry about that. If I forgot a page or two on the permanent redirects, the Search Engine Spiders will eventually figure it out, and gather the proper pages to add to the online search directory database.

Warning about deleted Blogger Blogs!

I was however a little nervous when I went to delete the old blog from my Blogger account. I did not want to accidentally delete the wrong Blogger blog. It paid off and was good that I had two slightly different names for each of the blogs for identification purposes. There is no recovery if you accidentally delete the wrong blog in your Blogger account. Deleted Blogger Blogs are gone forever and Google will not be able to get them back for you.

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Microsoft Windows Live Writer Multi Platform Blog Writer & Blog Editor Review
Five Star Recommendation

Table of contents posting was done with Microsoft Windows Live Writer to Jim’s Blogger account. See some of the cool features and read about Windows Live Writer blog editor software review below.

Jim’s Online Table of Contents For Internet Review

This is my year end table of contents for Internet Jim. Actually this TOC goes back a couple of years. I figured it was about time to have a quick review of some of the postings at this website. I created this template using Microsoft Windows Live Writer beta addition. Windows Live Writer is a cross platform, free desktop blog editor that allows you to quickly add tables to your blog postings. You can quickly and easily switch between multiple servers and blog platforms such as: Blogger, Windows Live, WordPress, SharePoint, LiveJournal, TypePad, Community Server accounts, and others. A number of features include quickly adding images, videos, maps, and tables.

The advanced tables feature was exactly the main feature I was searching for online, when I happen to stumble onto the Microsoft Live Writer software table solution. Tables, like a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, are very useful when it comes to posting things in a logical order of columns and rows, with headings and descriptions included. Columns and rows can be quickly added and changed in size in a WYSISWYG, What You See Is What You Get, writing environment even if the cell, column, or row already has text or other information inside of it. Simply drag the columns or rows to increase their sizes and quickly set centering parameters for both the table and cells (horizontal and vertical parameters), and applying these horizontal and vertical parameters to entire columns and rows too.

Adding pictures into the middle of a blog posting is easy. Place your cursor where you want the image to be included in the posting, and click add image and have the text wrap too. There are some other cool features for images that makes if fun to just play around with the look and feel of what you intend to post online.

For example, you can quickly rotate an image and add watermarks to pictures that are on your computer to begin with, as the source picture, before uploading the image online. Add custom margins, borders, drop shadow borders, photo paper looks, reflections, rounded corners, and solid borders to images. Text wrap right (as the walking penny above), text wrap left (as the image is on the right), inline images, and image centering as the free form image below are just a click away. Linking to an image source or other url is easy without having to know any html coding. Images can also be added from an online source location such as Picasa Albums, Photobucket, ImageShack, Flickr, and other image hosting websites just by selecting the url of the image and adding it to the image prompt. You can also quickly size the image to any image size you need with customizable pre-assigned thumbnail sizes.

Additionally there are some really cool, fascinating, and advanced features for image editing. Contrast and brightness are easy to slide adjust, once again in a WYSISWYG view. A very powerful, yet intuitive cropping feature is also available for your image. As I said before, you can rotate the image, but also the image can be quickly tilted in the posting itself. See below.

Free Form Image With Tilt and Reflection Advanced Effects Features

This cool free-form picture certainly adds another image reflection and a completely new dimension to what you can do with a free-form picture image. Note the optical illusion along the left and right side of the image which makes it look like the posting is tilted.

Before the posting is ever published on the Internet, Windows Live Writer has the option to display the post in a preview form of the template you are using on the Web. This feature will show the full affect of how it will look when it is published online. You can also edit the source html code too. You can post to your blog in draft mode or publish live. Once the blog posting is published online, then you can use Microsoft Windows Live Writer to do future edits directly from your computer desktop and then re-publish your posting to view it online live.

Of course, Windows Live Writer features include a real time spell checker, save as draft mode, automatically save drafts at a fully customizable set period of time (every one, two, or three minutes, or more), plus it also includes word count, characters counter (with and without spaces counts), and paragraphs counts too. Links, font sizes, font styles, colors, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings, block quotes, bullets, numbered lists, left align, center align, right align, and justified text is easy with a quick click from the icons at the top of the editor. Right click on the mouse to display most used features such as link building, alignment, numbering, and bullets. Auto linking is another feature. Simply type in the url address like http://wow.jimwarholic.com or predefine keyword hyperlinks and the software program turns it into a hyperlink for you. Sidebar can be switched off or on which will display recently posted and open drafts, along with insert hyperlinks, pictures, tables, maps, video, and add plug-ins too. Download the Windows Writer Beta now with new features.

Wow! I have to say, I really am quite impressed on what Microsoft Windows Live Writer Blog Editor can do. There are more features to this blog editor software program then meets the eye. With over a hundred add-on plug-ins available to download online, with more being added, Windows Live Writer is likely to become a very powerful and useful online/desktop software blog editor tool. And, did I tell you the best of all, Windows Live Writer is available free of charge.

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Open Letter to Google And Blogger,

Reference: Blogger Buzz: Updates and Bug Fixes for August 14th

According to this posting from Blogger the new feature was to provide more functionality. “There’s a new look for the Blogger Dashboard, which we think you’ll find more attractive and functional. If you have a ton of blogs (as we do) try out the “hide” and “show all” links to help manage the list.”

Well I tried it, and here is the hidden scoop.

Missing Blogs in The Blogger Dashboard

I am having a problem of the missing blogs in the Blogger Dashboard area ever since the Blogger dashboard update. Some readers have suggested that it is a case of not clearing the cache and cookies in the browser. I can assure everyone out in Internet land that it is not the clearing the cache and cookies problem in my browser(s) and computer(s) that is causing the problem.

What happens is that when “Show all” is clicked, it shows all and then when I click the “Always show” button next to the blog itself, it toggles to “Hide” except I still have one blog that is hidden permanently from the dashboard. However, the number count of the blogs shown is never updated. When I do a refresh again, the blogs are hidden again no matter what I do.

When Blogger added the “Show all” and “Hide” blogs Javascript from the dashboard, this is when my blogs started disappearing from the dashboard.

To check out some other blogs in my account, I tried hiding other blogs from the dashboard. This did indeed hide them, but now they stay hidden permanently. “Show All” works temporarily but does not latch to “always” when clicking the “Always show.” Now, only a few of the blogs “Always show.”

I tried several other computers (both Mac and PC) to verify that the problem is not the cache.

I tried four different browsers. (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome)

Nothing I have tried makes any difference what so ever.

Note: I have blogs that are both FTP setup with blogs hosted on other servers, plus blogspot.com

Also note that this “According to Jim” blog that you are actually reading which completely disappeared from the dashboard, (except I can still get to it with the edit tool from a posting, at the actual url address) was setup with ftp publishing to begin with, and did not assign a blogspot address when originally created. I tried changing it to a blogspot url address but it still would not show up in the dashboard area. I subsequently switched back to my own custom domain name. I also added the blog to another Blogger account (see link below), but it will not show up at that dashboard either.

However, this blog does show up in the Blogger profiles pages of both though. This is really strange that it will show in the profile but will not display in the dashboard.

It really seems that the new javascript is the main problem.

I’m at my wits end.

Blogger used to have a contact form for problems, however they have discontinued that service. It’s frustrating not being able to contact Blogger anymore. Note: I have posted this on the Blogger Help Groups too, with no response.

Blogger please help.

Thank you

Jim

PS To post this posting I had to do the end-around link (through the quick edit link on a blog post, when logged into my Blogger account) to the Posting, Settings, and Template area of this blog, and then create a new posting.


Addendum

12/14/08 I took matters into my own hands. The hidden blog in the Blogger Dashboard fix is quite involved and there are some precautions that must be taken into account before tackling the problem.

12/16/08 For those in Internet land, I have now documented the procedure online of how to do it, with the complete details. This detailed how-to procedure for Blogger is posted at My Blogger Update. Hint, importing and exporting blogs are the keys to technical success.

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I like Blogger

I just wish Blogger had a simple way of creating static pages, that did not necessarily show up as a blog posted page.

Anyone that has been blogging for sometime will tell you, that there is certain information that a person or company would like to have readily available through a link on the blog itself to a separate page with the same branded template image as the main home page. Other times, it would really be cool if a person could have a unique page or pages that have a different template style. For example: maybe all the blogs posted under a particular label; a person would like to have a different image at the top of the page header to separate and visually identify the postings. There are Blogger workarounds and hacks that place in different pictures or images depending on certain parameters, but it would be nice to have maybe a different customizable template area for the static pages and/or labeled categories.

Additionally it would be cool if a person could easily blog to a different subdirectory area of the website when using Custom Domain Name Blogger publishing on another hosted account. While FTP publishing does allow multiple separate blogs under one domain name, custom domain name publishing does not provide the ability to create separate blogs under the main area of the website. Which means you can not have mondays.ws and mondays.ws/coolwidgets as a place to blog directly about coolwidgets. This would be a very handy feature to be able to easily add another subdirectory area under the current blog as a person would have with a unique category area and static pages on a regular website. You can however have other sub domain names with the same custom domain name using Blogger Custom Domain Name option. For example: backflag.com is the domain where I post short snippets using Tumblr as the free online publisher engine. But I use marketingstrategies.backflag.com as the custom domain name publishing option with Blogger to the sub domain marketingstrategies, for information about marketing strategies. Keep in mind that subdomains are typically viewed as separate websites and it is important to note from a search standpoint (see note below about having different websites).

Static Page Workaround for Blogger

Probably the simplest static page workaround for Blogger at this time is to go to the earliest blog posting date and post a new page with backdating it to this earliest time. Turn off comments and backlinks under post options for this posting if you want, and set the date to the oldest date. Then simply link to it.

The Strength of the Free Blogger Service

The strength of the free Blogger service is the ability to customize the html and css (cascading style sheets) code in order to create your own unique branded image. Other blog hosting services that offer free hosting such as WordPress, provide some of the features such as static pages but have severe limitations on what can be altered and customized with the css and the html.

The ability to use hundreds, if not thousands of free templates set up for the Blogger service is one of the features that I have come to love. Just about any webpage or website template can be converted to a Blogger template with having an understanding of the Blogger drive engine and placing the proper coding from Blogger into the template design area. This feature really makes it much easier to brand the blog to the current site design. Read about Blogging with Professional Web Services.

Additional Blogger Wishes

I love the new Blogger with XML. I wish we could use the XML features on the non Google hosting services. For example: currently one of the Blogger options is in the classic design template mode for ftp publishing to a paid hosted provider with full customization. We have our website at www.pwebs.net for Internet marketing services. We publish a blog using Blogger at: www.pwebs.net/internet-marketing.htm about the Internet marketing industry, in which we write about various aspects of Internet marketing. Currently we are using ftp publishing for the blog, and a customized classic template design. There are some pretty cool features that XML has, as compared to the standard ftp classic design template. If the XML new Blogger templates could be used for other than the free Blogspot account hosting or the Custom Domain option (see below), then it would make it much easier to customize and manage the information for publishing.

I know I said this before but it bares repeating. Blogger currently allows you to use the Custom Domain name option, but hosting still takes place on Blogger servers, and only allows one blog per main domain name without subdirectories as compared to ftp publishing (see above). A person can create Sub Domains for different blogs using the custom domain name option, but these are considered separate websites, and if information was substantially the same between these Sub Domains, the Search Engines would more than likely not look too favorably to having created additional subdomains. For example: www.jimwarholic.com could have a subdomain as info.jimwarholic.com with unique information at both areas and this would be OK. This is no different than Blogger hosted services with millions of subdomains at blogspot.com, such as eclectic-marketing.blogspot.com and professionalwebservices.blogspot.com.

One of the reasons I have come to really like using the Blogger service is because Google allows you to use javascripts in the templates themselves. WordPress free blog hosting restricts javascript from being added for additional features. WordPress states it’s because of security issues. I am not convinced that javascript is the problem as opposed to simply WordPress engineers taking the time to allow javascript to be used securely in the first place. Listen, I am not bashing WordPress, because I too have a WordPress blog with Jim West as the blog name, and I like posting there from time to time, but I am simply stating the main differences that I see between Blogger and WordPress.

One reason to choose Custom Domain Name Blogger publishing over FTP publishing is the speed at which a page publishes using the custom domain name option. Whereas on an ftp account, hosted somewhere else, it can involve quite a delay with ftp publishing timeouts on very large blogs. Custom Domain Name publishing is also easier to add widgets and other items for the novice blogger. Expert bloggers can also customize the templates quite extensively.

In this world, nothing is ever perfect as it is. Everything man-made can always be improved. Not everyone will have everything they want. What are some of your thoughts on the Blogger wish list? What features would you like to see added? One last thing that I forgot to mention is I would like the labels to be able to automatically show up when using classic template de
signs for ftp publishing, just like in the XML template designs provides the sidebar widget to display the labels. Currently for classic templates you have to create the list manually for the sidebar areas.

Internet Marketing Strategies and Services for businesses on the web.

I decided to tackle the custom domain name setup again for Google Custom Domain names for both Blogger and Google Apps. The instructions for setting up a custom domain name with Blogger seem simple enough, but when entering a CNAME record and having the WWW point to ghs.google.com produces only half the desired results.

Here is an actual example of what I am talking about. When entering www.wednesdays.ws, that takes you to one blog. But when entering just plain wednesdays.ws, it would say the blog could not be found or something like that. So I decided to see what would happen if I created a second blog, and using the custom domain feature to point this second blog to a nearly identical template, but with different blog postings. Now both blog sites work independently of one another. Take a look at wednesdays.ws.

The Blogger system allowed for independent blogs on both the www and without the www. This really is not an ideal setup because most people think of www.wednesdays.ws and wednesdays.ws as one and the same site. However, the WWW is actually a subdomain of wednesdays.ws.

What’s The WWW Solution?

In the Blogger Help Group is a thread for Custom Domain. This particular thread talks about the very problematic issue, and unfortunately does not appear to have a fix at this time. I can’t help but think that there has to be some enterprising individual that has come up with a definitive answer to this CNAME record problem. Apparently, CNAME records are suited for subdomains and not the domains themselves. Here are a couple of articles that talk about the details of what is required.

Google Custom Domains – Elegant Yet Unreliable

Google Custom Domain – The DNS Referral

The interesting thing about CNAME records being for subdomains, is the fact that I was able to publish two different blogs using WWW for one and no WWW for the other.

Below is the actual GoDaddy Total DNS Control Panel screen shot. Click on the image to open it in a new window, with a larger view.

This has not been the only experiment with Google and the Custom Domain Names. Several months back, I had set up this website with a custom domain name and used both a blog for publishing, plus bring your own domain name at Google Apps. This was exceptionally interesting in the aspect that the WWW was being published at the blog, and the other without the WWW was being published at Google Apps. This does seem to work, but in my estimation is confusing for the person browsing from one location to another, even though technically the WWW is a subdomain, most people do not realize that, and expect to go to the same place no matter which way they type in the domain name. I am not exactly sure how the search engines take to having each go to a different location.

On one of the experiments, I believe I was able to get it to partially function, except the articles themselves would not render properly. If the article posting was being published using the WWW blog, then when someone tried to type in the article location without the WWW it would not find the posting.

Since that time, with the two different locations option, I have switched this website to publish with ftp publishing using Blogger as the Blogging engine. With ftp publishing there is an option to turn off the Blogger tool bar. Now, because the site is hosted at another location, both the WWW and the site without the WWW render to the same web page.

Additional Experiments Were Tried

Here are some other items I tried to see what would happen to try to alleviate the problem of dual personalities with Google Custom Domain name publishing. I located the IP address for where the particular blog was being published. I then created an “A” record which pointed to the location of the blog. I don’t remember all the particulars of exactly what happened, but I do remember there were performance issues. Additionally I tried to do a Meta Redirect in one of the blogs to go to the other. This also had performance issues, and the search engines probably penalized the website for having a meta redirect with little time involved before the page was redirected. Also, having a redirect places the person using a web browser, who wants to use the back button, in a position of not being able to easily get back to his or her starting point. Simply put, people do not like being hemmed in and not able to get back in their browser. So, that option was not ideal.

There has got to be an answer. If I only wanted to have a unique blog subdomain name on the front of my website, then using Google Custom Domain name publishing is no problem at all. Any suggestions from anyone? Google, do you folks have any answers?

Sincerely,

Jim Warholic the Internet marketing marketeer