I’ve spent hours this week (and last) figuring out how to work around an issue that should have been easy to begin with. Like transfering contacts from one cell phone to another. Or, importing posts and comments from a Blogger blog to WordPress.
Right now I’m in the middle of a WordPress workaround. You see, Blogger exports an .xml file, but WordPress only imports .wrs files. WordPress allows you to sync your Blogger account to your new WordPress blog and import directly, but apparently, that only works for small sites.
There is a wonderful tool, created by Google, which allows you to upload your .xml file (export from Blogger) and it will covert it to a .wrs (WordPress) file for you. But, once again, there’s a size limit. My 101MB file simply wouldn’t go through.
The client I’m currently working with has over 800 posts and over 71,000 comments. WordPress simply freaks out when I try to import from Blogger. I got it part was yesterday, but it froze up and woudn’t go any further. After much research and experimenting with a couple suggested workarounds, I found a post that said if you import directly from Blogger to a WordPress.com site, then export the content as a WordPress file (.wrs) you can then import that to your self hosted WordPress.org site.
Would you know, I left the this computer running last night, hoping it would all be imported by morning, only to wake up and find my computer had shut down everything I had open, and had apparently restarted itself. :-O So, I’m back at it again this morning. (fortunately, the import picks up where it left off.)
537 of 892 posts and 19,842 of 71,422 comments, and counting, imported so far.
Dear WordPress,
Please, please, make a way for users to upload .xml files!!! It would make our switch to your service so much easier!!!
Did you ever find a fix for this? I am finding that blogs with lots of comments end up losing comments.
I’ve actually learned to increase the wp upload limit via the .htaccess file and the wp memory limit via the wp-config file. This helps tremendously when importing a large blog. I havent done blogger to wp in a while, but I think it should solve a lot of those issues too.