1. Make sure that your blog is in the “new” Blogger format and is not hosted on your own FTP server. To do this, first make sure that Blogger is publishing to a domain at blogspot.com and that you are using one of the new templates. If you can use the new templates or widgets, you are running the new Blogger.

Go to Tools, then Import to grab data from your other blog.

2. Install WordPress on your host, and go to Tools, then Import. Choose Blogger from the list, give WordPress permission to grab your posts, and sit back. WordPress will soon have all your posts, tags, and comments. After importing the XML the button changes to allow you to map Blogger authors to WordPress authors. Remember that if you were publishing on your own FTP with Blogger, it may have put images in a different folder than WordPress does. Feel free to reconfigure WordPress, and move Blogger’s folder of images to where it needs to be on your host.

3. To preserve links, go to Settings, then Permalinks. Here you can choose a format for posts, categories, and tags to be used when WordPress generates links. Select Custom Structure and add the path /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html. This will ensure that you can preserve your traffic when you move over to WordPress, so users who have bookmarked the old posts won’t get lost. WordPress might not be able to edit the .htaccess file for you after saving the permalink changes. If this happens it will produce the necessary code at the bottom of the page, which is easy to overlook.

Edit the path settings to reflect your desired URL format.

4. FOR ADVANCED USERS: The last step is to go into the default WordPress theme folder (wp-content/themes/default) and edit style.css and the pieces of the PHP template (header, footer, sidebar, etc.) to match what you had before. Be advised that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can really screw up your template this way, but this is where you want to be if you have a very customized layout.

… and voila, now you should have a working WordPress blog with all your Blogger content safely inside. Hope this helps you make the transition.

Oh and sorry for not making any posts since August, we’ve been busy I guess.