Blogsphere To WordPress Migration Complete

Over the past few days I’ve been moving my blog to WordPress. There were a few things that I needed to do to get everything working and I thought it might be handy to anybody else thinking of doing the same.

First of all, I found Matt White had written a LotusScript agent a while back and given it to Mitch Cohen who published it, with permission, on his blog. I took that agent, made a couple of minor changes to it and exported a nice hefty xml file that I then fixed up in Eclipse and then imported into my new WordPress blog.  Here is my copy of the agent wpexport

To deal with images in blog posts I changed all references to http://www.qtzar.com to domino.qtzar.com before I ran the import. I then added a plugin to WordPress called ‘Add Linked Images To Gallery’ and ran it against the imported blog entries. What this did was download the images from the server domino.qtzar.com, added them to the WordPress gallery and then changed the blog entry so it would point the image urls to the gallery. Now all my old images are directly in WordPress and I don’t have to worry about maintaining the nsf.

PermaLinks were the next thing that I wanted to get working. What’s the point of having a PermalLink if it is not going to work after you move your blog. These were easy enough to deal with. A few simple Apache Rewrite Rules did the trick. Here’s what I added to the stop of the .htaccess file in my Apache root directory.

RewriteRule ^blog.nsf/d6plinks/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)?$ /blog/$1 [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blog.nsf/stories.xml /feed/ [NC,R=301,L]

These rules will rewrite the incoming URL and point it to your new permalink structure, they issue a 301 redirect so the asking browser gets the new URL in the addressbar and so search engines know to update their links. The second rule redirects the original BlogSphere RSS feed so any people using RSS to read your blog will get the new feed without having to change anything on their end.

There are still a few more minor things I need to migrate and I’ll probably go through all my posts to fix up the categories and tags but I hope this info helps anybody else who is thinking of migrating to WordPress.