After five and a half years of hosting “Verily I Say Unto Thee...” on Blogspot (Blogger), I’ve made the switch to self-hosting. With the built-in importer plugin for WordPress, I was able to import all my former Blogspot posts to the new location.

For anyone who cares to read older posts in my archive, note that some of the formatting didn’t come through correctly. I don’t know if this was due to Blogspot’s formatting process, the conversion process, or the WordPress importer. I may go back and try to fix the formatting someday; I don’t know.

I hope you like the new home for Verily, and that you continue reading.

As always, my home on the web is wilcfry.com. There, you’ll find links to my blogs, my pictures, poems, stories, book reviews, and other nonsense that I’ve made public on the internet.

Also, as always, wilcfry.com/blogs/ will be my “blog home”, where you’ll find links to my most recent blog entries from both my blogs.

As before, I’ll try to keep Verily only for my opinions and commentary, while My Life is — as the name suggests — more of a journal.

To suggest changes to this blog’s layout/design, or to suggest a topic for a future opinion piece, feel free to email me at:

The Process

The process was not easy, and I did it to two separate blogs at once, from two different platforms. My Life was hosted on Xanga for more than five years, while Verily was on Blogger/Blogspot. Both locations had many old posts and comments. Neither made it easy to migrate my content.

It was easier with Blogger, which had a built-in “export” feature, and the “import” feature built into WordPress was able to handle the files created by Blogger. Frustratingly, almost all my formatting was borked, and the time zones went awry — so some of the timestamps on those posts are now messed up and the comments are all gone.

Xanga content was much more difficult to transfer. WordPress was more helpful than Xanga in this regard, providing a link to a third-party app (“xanga.r”) that could scour my Xanga site and create an XML file, which WordPress could then read to import the entries.

So, I went to install the third-party app. It turned out it wasn’t actually an application, but a script, which had to be run inside a different program, called “Rebol”. There were poorly-laid-out webpages and suspicious links all through this process. But I forged ahead and installed Rebol, which fortunately included something else I needed, called “RebGUI”. It didn’t work. I eventually figured out (without outside help) that I then needed to copy/paste the “xanga.r” and “xword.r” scripts into the newly installed folders that contained RebGUI.

Then, when I finally did all this and opened Rebol, it wasn’t intuitive to use and looked like it was designed in the 1990s. After some time and increasing frustration with this entire process, I got it to start running. It created a few new folders; that was it. then I had to go back to the installation folder and run the xword.r script, which FINALLY brought up the Xanga importer.

It took 10 minutes or more to scroll through the data on my Xanga site, collecting information, and finally created the promised XML file. Importing that XML file to WordPress actually was the smoothest, most intuitive part of the whole process.

But... if you looked closely at that screenshot (above or at right, depending on your device), you noticed the earliest entry it found was from 2006, though I had begun blogging on Xanga a year earlier. And there were plenty of errors “parsing” stuff. So, nearly a year’s worth of my blog entries were simply ignored by this script, and ZERO comments came through. There were hundreds of formatting errors — far more than I saw with my Blogger importation. Also, because the script never asked for any credentials, it couldn’t pull any private posts from Xanga — it was only reading the RSS feed from my Xanga blog. (And I forgot to mention that the script wouldn’t run at all with any themes installed. I had to disable all Xanga themes before the script would work.)

This was insanely difficult, far harder than it should have been. It made WordPress’s built-in import/export processes seem like heaven by comparison.

Addendum

Later, I noticed that even for the entries that were successfully imported from Xanga, a new “category” was created for each entry. Each “category” was blank and was assigned to just one entry. So, since I successfully imported more than 700 entries from Xanga, I now have more than 700 useless categories on my new blog that I’m deleting page-by-page through the WordPress dashboard. Also, though almost all my Xanga entries were tagged, none of the tags were imported with the blog entries.

Addendum, 2012.03.07

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