Birth Pains, or It Hurts Coming Back From the Dead

Should you find yourself in the situation of needing to move oh, let’s say 1,100 Blogger posts to your new WordPress site (dot org…as in hosted by you), my experiences might be useful:

1. You might think that you can just export your Blogger blog to an XML file and import it. But WordPress won’t play with an XML file that’s bigger than 2MB, so you’re SOL.
2. You might then think that Blogger must certainly have some way to selectively export to an XML file, so you could break your exports in half, maybe by date. You might think that. But you’d be wrong, so you’re SOL.
3. Then you might think to try the native Blogger import function in WordPress. It will work, for a while, but then it will stop. So you’ll feel great for a few seconds, then you’ll start yelling salty epithets, when the progress bar stops at “104/1101″ and you realize you’re SOL.
4. You’ll then probably try deleting the few posts that came over, and re-importing. You’ll have varying degrees of success, which is to say not much, and you’re still SOL.
5. Some intrepid Googling suggests that you set up a WordPress.com (as in hosted by WordPress) blog, import from Blogger to that, and then export your posts and import to your new WordPress.org site. You’re getting slightly less SOL.
6. Eureka! Using the native Blogger importer from WordPress.com indeed and successfully imports all 1,101 posts! Home free!
7. Not quite.You then export all your posts from WordPress.com, only to find that the damn file is too big again. SOL!
8. Thankfully, your imaginary friends at WordPress have anticipated this, and you can scope your export into chunks smaller than 2MB.
9. You delete all your WordPress.org posts, import all your WordPress.com posts, and some still aren’t there. You arbitrarily set up different export chunks from WordPress.com, and for some reason, it works. Great success.

Ain’t technology great?