Importing Blogger

I’m using the latest version of WordPress, am hosted by Godaddy, and am having the same problem.

Even if you haven’t set up a secure server account with Google, it still gives you the option of authorizing the blog transfer, so it should work. But it just times out.

I don’t know if this is a glitch with Google, or WordPress.

This is, in fact, a GoDaddy problem. I’ve ran into it before. GoDaddy blocks a lot of outgoing ports (including HTTPS) from their shared hosts. This is not the case for their dedicated hosting services, which naturally cost more. The upshot is that the installation of WordPress on GoDaddy is unable to connect to Google to retrieve the posts and comments and such (Google requires a secure connection for this transfer of data).

The only way I was able to get around it was to setup a free blog on WordPress.com, import the Blogger blog to there, Export it from there as a WordPress export file, and then import that file into the WordPress installation on GoDaddy. Afterwards, delete the extra WordPress.com blog.

Note that if you’re talking about a LOT of posts, you may need to break the resulting export file up into multiple XML files to import it into the WordPress installation on your GoDaddy hosting.

So bottom line is there’s no way to do it direcly from Blogger to a Godaddy account (shared)?

Even if we have and SSL?

Also, I tried the WordPress.com idea. It only pulled over about 25% of the posts and comments.

So bottom line is there’s no way to do it direcly from Blogger to a Godaddy account (shared)?

Nope.

Even if we have and SSL?

That’s sort of the point. You don’t have outgoing SSL available to you on a GoDaddy shared hosting account, due to their firewall.

Also, I tried the WordPress.com idea. It only pulled over about 25% of the posts and comments.

You must have done something wrong, I had no problems importing several thousand posts from a Blogger account into a WordPress.com account.

There’s 305 posts, and about 1600 comments. It gets through about 50 or 80 of the posts, then starts working on the comments.

With the comments, it gets through about 190 of them, then stops.

The Author button then comes up.

I dunno what to tell you. It works perfectly for me. The number of posts and comments it gets is determined by what Google’s system tells it is the number of posts and comments. Unless you have more than one blog on that account and are only selecting one of them, it should get all of the posts/comments. If you only select one of them, then it will only get the posts for that one.

I suppose that you can try running it multiple times. It will skip posts that it already has gotten.

An alternative to using WordPress.com to import from Blogger is to setup a copy of WordPress on your own local machine (using XAMMP or something similar) and then importing them to that installation. I’ve done that before too. I usually use XAMPP Lite on my own machine, for quick setups.

Ok so I have Xammp running and wordpress installed on my local machine. Now it says:

Unable to find the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? (78)

So now what?

Edit the php.ini file in your XAMPP installation, make sure that the openssl extension is not commented out.

If that doesn’t help, find the libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll files and make sure they’re in your system path. Copying them to /windows/system32/ will do.

Ok, I took the ; off the line where Openssl was in the php.ini file. SO I assume that means it is no longer commented out.

Then I also put a copy of libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll into my system32 folders.

Nothin. Still the same error. Do I need to reset something?

I appreciate your continued efforts, Otto.

Make sure you restart Apache and the whole thing after making those INI and DLL changes. Otherwise they might not take effect.

Other than that, I’m lost. I’ll have to look at my installation when I get home to my own PC and see how I have it set up.

I may have found my own answer to get it activated. Gonna try this:

On Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003:

Go to Control Panel and open the System icon (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System, or just Start -> Control Panel -> System for Windows XP/2003)

Go to the Advanced tab

Click on the ‘Environment Variables’ button

Look into the ‘System Variables’ pane

Find the Path entry (you may need to scroll to find it)

Double click on the Path entry

Enter your PHP directory at the end, including ‘;’ before (e.g. ;C:\php)

Press OK and restart your computer

Let you know. Thanks again

Swiiiiiing and a miss.

Didnt work.

Well, I have no idea. I just installed XAMPP and a fresh WordPress and it worked for me, first try. Didn’t change a thing.

My advice: Stick with blogger. Clearly, you’re not meant to migrate.

Hahah….I’m already a WordPress fan. I have a dozen WP sites. I’m trying to bring over a client’s site to WP.

you might have already figured it out or moved on… BUT for anyone just visiting:
I had the same problem and followed this advice to solve it.

#1 if you have an FTP blogger blog switch it to blogspot (do this inside of blogger –>”publishing” tab)

2)go to wordpress.com and create a wordpress.com hosted blog.

3) import your blogger.com blog to wordpress.com

4)Once this is done, export the wordpress.com blog (in dashboard –>”manage” –export)

5) Finally, in your self-hosted wordpress site import the wordpress.com blog.

NOTE: if it gives you an error about you wp-content/uploads folder, you may get around it by changing the permissions on that folder to 777.

Hope this helps