The transfer of my blog has been successfully accomplished, and this is the location at which I shall maintain it. I hope to not have to move it ever again, but we’ll see

The steps take are here, for anyone else who wants to move their blog from being one hosted by WordPress.com to one hosted by their own web hosts:

1. Install the WordPress software – I did this on the site of my web host because they allow you to do it with a couple of clicks.
2. Go to newblog.com/wp-admin/install.php to create an admin account with a new blog with an example post and example comment. You can delete these or edit them or whatever. You can import the new blog into this new blog or create a new one, I suppose. I used this one.
3. Go to oldblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/export.php and export the entire blog as an .xml file. This is not recommended by WordPress as a means of backing up your blog, though, as it’s intensive.
4. Go to newblog.com/wp-admin/import.php and click RSS, which leads to a page with a prompt to enter your .xml file and import it. This step may take a while and it may look like it’s doing not very much of anything, but it is. Just leave it alone and go and make a cup of tea or something. When it’s done, it’ll tell you what it’s imported.
5. Check your blog – you should now have all your posts, but no comments and none of your links, only the default ones.
6. To import your links into your new sidebar, you first need to export the links from your old one. Go to newblog.com/wp-admin/link-import.php and specify the OPML URL as: http://oldblog.wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php. This will import all your links for you into one category, so you might have to faff about with them. Luckily, when it’s done, it not only tells you it’s done and what links it’s imported, but also gives you a link to manage them.
7. You’ll also probably have to redo your post category hierarchy, if you had one, as that information is lost in transit – this is the only information that is lost, though (as far as I can tell).

I think that’s about it, except for importing the comments. According to this, it’s not possible. How annoying is that?!

All I have to do now is add some content to the rest of the site.

Tell the world about this!

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categories: Life and Stuff
tags: blogging, computing
series: Changing hosts