Blogger to Wordpress Part 2 - Feeds, Re-directs & Permalinks

Feb

23rd

Blogger to Wordpress Part 2 - Feeds, Re-directs & Permalinks

Author: luq | Files under Blogging, software, the internet, tips, tutorials

This part of the Blogger to Wordpress post deals with some of the things you generally have to take care of just after you have moved to Wordpress from Blogger.

Generally all three of the things mentioned in the title (Feeds, Re-directs and Permalinks) should be done by modifying the htaccess file. It can also be done via plug-ins but you may encounter errors and problems as these plug-ins aren’t very efficient. It is advised to perform these changes via the htaccess file. You can scroll down to download the modified htaccess file with all the changes. All you’ll need to do is replace ‘yoursite’ and the other ‘easy-to-understand’ with values which fit your site.

Feeds

Changing your Feed URL is not as easy as changing a field in the settings as in Blogger. In Wordpress you will have to modify your htaccess file to redirect your Feed to your custom Feed URL, which is generally Feedburner. First of all you will need to open your htaccess file which would be in the parent directory of where your blog is, if it is in yoursite.com/blog your file would be there.

You can get a fully-functional code editor (Recommended) to modify your file from here.

Once you open the htaccess file you’ll need to add this piece of code to the top of the file:

“Redirect temp feedpath newfeedurl”

Feedpath – you can get this from your current feed URL, this would be in your ‘subscribe’ link of your blog. For example in Computer Realm this path is http://computer-realm.net/feed/. This alone is not the feed path, you will only need the part after the URL which is in this case “/feed/”.

NewFeedUrl – this is your new feed path which if it was burned from Feedburner it would be feeds.feedburner.com/yourname. In Computer Realm it would be feeds.feedburner.com/computer-realm.

Once you retrieve all these values it should be something like this:

“Redirect temp /feed/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/computer-realm”

Once you modify the htaccess file your feeds will now be re-directed to your new feed URL.

Permalinks

Once your feeds have been setup you might want to change your Permalink structure. By default all your links would be ugly as in the form of ‘yoursite.com/?p=[number], changing it to a form which includes your post’s title offers many benefits, a few of which are it helps in SEO and provides more relevant ads if you use contextualized advertising. To change your permalink structure goto Options > Permalinks and select your Permalink structure. If you want to re-direct your Blogger posts to Wordpress ( below). You’ll have to select Custom structure and put “/%postname%/” in there. This is also an excellent structure, which is in the form of “yoursite.com/yourpost”. Once you have done this you might be getting 404’s for all your posts except for the home page, to get around this problem replace your htaccess file with this:

# BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

If you have edited the htaccess file to re-direct your feeds you should leave that part of the htaccess file.

Re-directs

First of all, you can only do this if you moved from a Blogger custom domain. Sorry BlogSpot readers!

Once you have taken care of your feeds and permalinks you’ll probably want to redirect all your Blogger posts to your new Wordpress posts. I found this at BlogBloke:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9]+) http://yoursite.com/$1

This will only work if your Permalink structure is in the form of “/%postname%/”

All in one

Well, to make things easier I decided to upload an htaccess file with all the changes made. All you’ll need to do is open the file with PSPAD or a similar code editor. Replace your site with your website’s name and replace the other corresponding values like ‘feedpath’ and ‘feedURL’ with your values. (Refer above to see what these variables mean).

Download File

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