Moved my blog from WordPress to Blogger and Dropbox

Administrating PHP software on my own server is not something I'm particulary keen on doing. WordPress has had its fair share of security vulnerabilities so far and at the end of the day I want a blogging solution that gives me peace of mind. I moved to Blogger. Blogger lets me vote with my feet any day I would want to since it has an export feature, so I'm not locked in. At the same time I switched to the domain lassus.eu, for no particular reason.

I also needed to put my blog images somewhere and came up with the nifty idea of hosting them on Dropbox. Dropbox is one of the best services I've ever stumbled upon and since it supports URL accessible files (in the Public folder) this seemed like a perfect match. Perhaps they have some bandwidth limits but I don't think that's ever going to be a problem for this blog.

Here's how I moved it:

1. Deleted all comments that were tagged as spam (hidden) from the Wordpress dashboard. This is important or else they will get imported to blogger.
2. Used the Wordpress export feature, yielding an XML file in Wordpress language.
3. Downloaded the Google Blog Converters scripts. The wordpress2blogger.sh script converted the XML file to Blogger language.
4. Copied all of my images from my server's wp-content/ location to the Public/blog/ directory in my Dropbox. Found out the public URL location of files in that directory using the "Copy public link" feature of Dropbox.
5. Search and replaced the images location (fancy.se/wp-content/ -> dl.getdropbox.com/u/283098/blog/) and domain (fancy.se -> lassus.eu) in the XML file. Used sed for this since emacs crawled on its knees on this 300K one line textfile.
6. Used the Blogger import feature.

So far everything seems to work just fine. The old permalinks doesn't work longer but I can live with that. Got the twitter feed integrated and everything. Uploading an image to new posts is as easy as saving it in the Dropbox folder and pasting a URL. And best of all - no more security worries.

Peace of mind.