I wrote this post to myself on my personal blog in February while I was attempting to transition from my old site on Blogspot to my new site at Dreamhost. At the end of it, I over thought it, and should have simply shut down the Blogspot site after a month and not worried about redirection, but for those who wish to bash their heads against a wall, feel free to learn from this mistake. 

301 Redirect from Blogspot Blog

So while attempting to follow all the in’s and outs for the 301 redirect set up I made many blunders but I think I now have an 85% solution.

Using the WordPress sitemap, I was able to get a list of most of the articles and the archives on the WordPress side of things. I mistakenly thought that the article naming would be the same from WordPress to Blogspot, however that was a huge error, but that is putting ahead of myself. Let’s see if I can remember each blunder as I made it.

• I had a list of links that all were of the form http://canajunfinances.com/????/??/??/<article title> which needed to have the site stripped off them and then the date stripped off before the title name so that it became /YEAR/MN/<article title> .
• I installed VIM (vi for windows) to do a lot of this.
• First I imported .xml sitemap file into Excel and then stripped out the unusable columns, leaving a single column of the format in the first bullet. I then duplicated that column so I had two columns and then saved the file in tab separated format.
• The error with using excel which then saved it, is that it broke a bunch of the longer lines into TWO lines, but I only figured that one out later.
• I opened the text file in VIM, and replaced the http://canajunfinances.com with what was needed to make Redirect 301 old-page-trail new-page-full-URL.
• So now I had a file with two columns with all of these 301 redirects which I then saved as .htaccess.
• On my web site I saved the existing .htaccess file in a BACKUP directory and then noted it had stuff in it already, so I appended all my redirects onto the end and tried it on my site. SERVER FAILURE messages came up. I put back the old .htaccess and the site came back.
• I then shot myself in the foot by accidently deleting a bunch of the files in my blog’s directory, spent 1/2 an hour piecing it back together. Don’t do that!
• Tried a few iterations of the .htaccess file, the first one with just the Month archives, which worked fine.
  • To test it you have to go to the BLOGSPOT publish section and point the BLOGSPOT blog to the new site. It is also easy to undo.

  I got bold and tried a bigger file and it failed.

• After trying that a few times, I then decided to test my .htaccess file on my home wordpress config on my local pc (no ftp involved and no danger of screwing up my real site).
• Tried full .htaccess file again, Server failure.
  • Removed most of the list, and the server was fine.
  • Added month at a time, and waited to get a failure, which I then found, after a few additions.
  • This is where I figured out that the command lines were getting broken into two lines with a ^M in them. Had to fix all of those (about 100 of them) by hand.
  • Once they were all fixed I had a complete file that did not cause my server to crash. Notice I didn’t say that worked right.

  Now that I had a .htaccess file that didn’t cause my server to crash I uploaded it to my WordPress site via FTP.

• Moved blogspot to point at my new site, month archives worked fine, so then I tried out some of my individual postings, and started getting Error 404 (article not found).
• Learned that Blogspot removes many common words from their posting addresses on line, such as “A”, “THE” and a few other, so by hand I removed those from a plethora (over 300) postings.
• Oh I also had to remove the DAY date from the postings earlier on as well (on EVERY posting, over 750).

I now have a working .htaccess that I sure does not work for every single posting, but should point most of the posts over from my old site. I need to create entries for categories, and other things as well.

Epilogue

It all worked eventually but I must have spent over 30 hours elapsed time on this, and at the end of it, I still ended up with a ZERO Page Rank for a while because Google thought I was attempting to double post the same content. 

I would suggest doing what I have done now, which is blow away the old blogspot site after a grace period, recreate it and have it have 1 post which points to your new site, and then use various tools to find all the links to your OLD site and ask the owners of the linking site to update their links to your new site. Might take a little less time, too!

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Simply use a 301 redirect with some devilishly ingenious code from TechCounter:

301 Permanent Redirect from Blogger Beta to WordPress

11. May 2007, 10:51 By Ryan Ferone

Most Bloggers start out with free blog hosting with the most popular of the free services being Google’s blogger where you get a yoursite.blogspot.com address. Now you want to move from Blogger to your own domain. One of the best publishing software is provided by WordPress and the best part is it is free. Importing to WordPress from Blogger used to be a breeze using WordPress’s import posts feature. However when Google moved from Blogger to the new Blogger or Blogger Beta, it became impossible to use WordPress’s import utility.

However, you can now do so with the steps outlined here about Importing Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

Many users were able to implement this method successfully. Now, we move to the next step. Lets deal with some questions I had so far …

1. What happens to my old blogger blog? Should I just delete it after importing to WordPress?

2. I heard Google penalizes duplicate content. I now have my posts at both my old blogger blog and my new WordPress blog hosted on my domain. What should I do?

3. You mentioned using the 301 permanent redirect from blogger to wordpress. Can i do it?

Okay … lets deal with these questions first.

1. No, you should not delete your Blogger blog. I am sure you worked hard at it. You might have many subscribers to that blog. The search engines have content indexed to that blog. What happens if you delete your blogger blog is simple … you end up LOSING ALL YOUR TRAFFIC, all your loyal subscribers and visitors simply because they dont know your new address.

2. Yes, Google penalizes duplicate content. How do you deal with this.. well read on

3. When people move from their old website to a new one they use a 301 permanent redirect method without being penalized by the search engines. However, you cannot do this straight up with Blogger because you do not have access to your .htaccess file. So its not a simple plug and play unfortunately because of this.

How to redirect your old Blogger posts to your New wordpress blog posts using a permanent redirect

I wanted to thank Owen Barder for his excellent code to redirect your individual posts from blogger to wordpress. Also, thanks to Tom Sherman. I will try to stick to what these two guys have to tell.

Using the method outlined here, you will be able to

1. Redirect your visitors from your old Blogger blog to your WordPress Blog on your domain

2. Redirect your old posts to new posts on your wordpress blog instead of redirecting them just to your home page of your wordpress blog

3. Do all this in such a way that Google does not penalize you. You also get to transfer your Google Page Rank too. How about that ….. !

Step # 1: Import from Blogger Beta to your WordPress domain

I am assuming that you backed up your blog and Imported to your WordPress domain from the new Blogger or Blogger Beta. If you didn’t do, check out my article on Import from Blogger Beta to WordPress

Step # 2: Modify your Blogger Template to include redirects

Log into your Blogger account. Go to Template and then Edit HTML. Paste the code shown below where you replace http://www.yoursite.com with the root URL of your WordPress Blog

a. Add the code below after <Blogger> in your template

<MainOrArchivePage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var blog_root=http://www.yoursite.com/;
document.location.href=blog_root;
//–></script>
</MainOrArchivePage>

<ItemPage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var process_page=”http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php”;
var newpage=process_page;
var oldlink=”<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”;

newpage+=”?p=”+oldlink;
newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();
document.location.href=newpage;
//–></script>
</ItemPage>

b. Add the line shown here somewhere in between the <head> ..</head> tags of your blog

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com/” />

Notice the space between /” and the />

somewhere in between the <head></head> tags like this:

<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com”>
</head>

Step # 3: Prepare your WordPress blog for Redirects

a. Open Notepad. Copy and paste the code given below. Save it as bloggerposts.php or anything else you want and put it in the root location of your wordpress blog. By root, I mean not in any wp-admin or any other folder, but in the root and the link should be something like http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php

<?php

require($_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’].’/blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
$search_link = $_GET[’p'];
$vars = explode(’/’, $search_link);
$num = count($vars) – 1;
$filename = $vars[$num];
$slug = str_replace(”.html”, “”, $filename);

$SQL = “SELECT posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts AS posts WHERE posts.post_name = ‘$slug’ LIMIT 1″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results(”$SQL”);

if ($posts) {
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$found_link = get_permalink($post->ID);
}
}
else
{
$found_link = “http://www.yoursite.com/”;
}

?>

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirecting…</title>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
document.location.href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”;
//–></script>

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”>

</head>
<body>
<h1>Redirecting…</h1>
<p>You can also proceed immediately to <a href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”><?php echo ($found_link); ?></a>.</p>
<p>The main blog URL is <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/” mce_href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”>www.yoursite.com</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

All you need to do in the above code is wherever you see http://www.yoursite.com , change it to the root location of your WordPress blog. What this code is doing is taking the URL from Step # 2 and redirect the user to the corresponding entry in your wordpress blog. In case it does not find the corresponding entry, it redirects to the homepage of your blog.

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So after figuring it was long enough wait I have destroyed and recreated both original entries of my Blogs.

Originally this site was Not How To Do It on Blogspot and it held pretty much an exact duplicate of a lot of the entries in this site, however, I did the following steps:

1. Log onto the Blogspot web site
2. Go to the Template section and save the HTML that is the template for this site (I copied it into Notepad)
3. Go into the Settings area for the blog, at the bottom select DELETE this blog from Blogspot (be very sure when you do this because it will disappear completely).
4. Wait about 5 minutes for Blogspot to settle down
5. Go back and CREATE the exact same blog, with the exact same domain name (change the title to say OLD Version of site, or something like that).
6. Once creation is complete, copy back the Template from the site you saved.
7. Turn off all Comment capabilities.
8. Create an entry that says We Have Moved that points to your new site

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Essential Blogging

I took this book out of the Ottawa Public library just to see what interesting tid bits I might pick up, as I usually find all books by O’Reilly and Associates very informative.

The book itself is an excellent resource for beginner bloggers who want to start out and figure out how to set up their blog (using Blogspot as their hosting software). It does a step by step set up procedure and then starts adding in more and more details for the beginner to “tweak” and enhance their content to get more readers and more interest in what they write (unless you are writing a blog you don’t want anybody to read, very useful advice).

When I first started blogging I think I would have appreciated this book a lot more because it talks about changing the default templates from Blogspot and how to use all the variables that blogspot gives you access to.  Lots of information on how to customize the default blogroll for the blogspot set up would have helped me a lot as well.

Some information about Movable type work, that I skimmed, since I wasn’t really interested in it.

Review:Overall a very useful book for the beginner blogger who wants to get started quickly and wants to learn the ins and outs of blogging and get up and running quickly. If you use blogspot I would also recommend this book (although hopefully there is a newer version that elaborates on the Widgets in the new Blogspot configuration). 

I did not buy this book, I borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library and would not buy it myself, but it was a useful read for me.

ISBN: 0-596-0038-9

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I have been trying to find a smart way to clean up my old blog on blog spot Canadian Financial Rants, but I finally bit the bullet and deleted it and then recreated it.  That purged all of the entries on the site, and now it has a single entry telling whoever trips over the site to go to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions, instead. My concern is with the old site still around if Google’s bots found it and went through it my page rank would get set back to zero (again), as it stands now, the only official copies of my content are now on Canadian Financial Opinions, so I am happy with that.

I also noticed that Alexa has 82 sites that link into Canadian Financial Rants, so I used Alexa to point out these sites and then started sending the Blog owners where the links are that the blog they are pointing at has moved to Canadian Financial Opinions. Where it was not possible, I simply left a comment on the site that also pointed to Canadian Financial Opinions, so hopefully this will add to my Alexa IN-Link count and this might help my Page Rank as well, we shall see on that part, but a useful way to find messed up links too.

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This is quite funny because now both my sites have this page rank, including this site. I am astounded to see that somehow this simple little “on line notebook” is actually ranked at 2/10, while my Canadian Personal Finance Blog which has thousands of links and such is also 2/10 (but then again, so is the Canadian Capitalist, and he is a much higher ranked blogger than I am).  What’s funny is our friend over at Canadian Money Review is ranked 3/10 yet he hasn’t posted anything in months (busy with new baby and such). 

I think I am getting my ranks back because I have turned off the “Bots” on my left over sites over at Blogspot. At the end of the year, I am going to delete the Financial One, since it still seems to be creating “echos” throughout the Web, and the redirection from Blogspot does not seem to work that well these days either. 

Given I am using Chrome much more these days, I haven’t really been looking at my page rankings (haven’t got a chrome add in for this), so I only noticed that this site seems to have a page rank of 2/10 on Friday. I am not getting deluged with advertising opportunities here yet, and somehow I doubt that will happen, but then again, you never know either.

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So after spending most of my spare time this past weekend, repairing any links on my web site that pointed at it’s old Blogspot address, I am now attempting to tackle all of the rest of the broken links on Canadian Personal Finance blog, and it is turning out to be another behemoth of a task.

Using the WordPress Broken Link Plug In, I found that along with the hundreds of links to my old web site I had over 160 broken links on my site pointing to various non-existant sites or posts on the Web, Oh Joy!

The interface for the Plug In is very straight forward, so that is good, but I am also cleaning up the postings as well (deleting some posts, that I must have written while asleep, or when I was in a particularly lazy mood, that is for sure). You can simply discard the bad link and that speeds things up a lot, but I have many images that I have linked to that are no longer there, which I want to clean up (the post looks stupid without them).

This site only has 1 broken link, so that is kind of cool too.

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Originally posted on my finance blog after a particularly vulgar weekend that I spent cleaning up hundreds of SPAM comments on my blogspot account. Spam, Spam, Spam…..

I don’t like SPAM !

No that is not my breakfast, it is what I am now continually finding as “comments” on this page. I have turned off Anonymous comments, since those are just an invitation for idiots to come and spew stupidities, but this is even worse.

Typically what happens is there is a comment like:

You go and look and it is a page with 1 entry on it and 10,000 Adsense ads, so the only thing you CAN click are the ads (not my FUNNY LINK, that is a link to the SPAM FAN CLUB!). That is just poor sportsmanship, an abuse of blogging and a pretty tacky way to make money (only in this author’s humble opinion). Yes, I have adsense ads, and yes I’d like to make money on them, but at least I create relatively relevant and new content, not just an obvious, ca$h grab!

I espouse Debt Reduction, taking control of your finances and I am now a crusader against SPAM. As a kid actually I liked “Klik” more than SPAM anyway.

OK a real posting is coming soon, but I had to get that one off my shoulder! Oh and if you click on the SPAM picture you go to the SPAM-A-LOT Broadway Show Home page.

Do you like SPAM? I love it!

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The more I learn, the more I realize how much I have to learn, is sort of how my week has been going for this blog.

After realizing that there must be BLOGSPOT based internal links in the content on this web page that points to my old Not How To Do It blog, I wondered how could I find all of that.

The easiest way to deal with it was:

1. Go into your WordPress Dashboard
2. Select “Manage Posts”
3. And then in SEARCH input your old blogspot address (in my case nothowtodoit.blogspot.com)
4. Voila, all posts that you have that have internal linksto your posts on your Blogspot site!

For me it was simple only 5 posts to fix, one, two three all updated to point to my new site address, all internal links fixed and happy no problemo.

Then I wondered, how many of the posts on this site have internal links to my old finance site? Go back to the Manage Posts page and input  canajunfinances.blogspot.com, OH CRAP! Pages upon pages of posts with internal links back to my old site. I am slowly cleaning up that mess, one by one, and adding tags so it is a long tedious methodology for now.

Then I realized I need to do this on Canadian Financial Opinions as well. OH CRAP!!!! That is going to be hundreds of posts to fix with internal links! Darn.

BDV-361074-BDV

Is there a better way, to do bulk edits in WordPress?

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Figured Walter’s Turkey story was a sure fire winner, but I guess there just isn’t a market for psychotic, pseudo farmers who don’t know how to kill poultry. It was an idea.

The traffic on this site continues to be a little flat, but then again, it is not like I am posting a great deal of useful information either.

On the Canadian Financial Views web site, traffic continues to be it’s normal brisk self of about 200 visitors and over 500 RSS subscribers as well. I really need to figure out a way to make money on the RSS side of things, given that I have so few folks that actually visit the site (and all of it’s advertising whore-dom).

Still tinkering with moving away from Blogspot, but might take this and my family blog away first and see how much work it actually is. Blogspot is so darn easy to use, not sure why I would be changing except to get away from the “Oh you are only a Blogspot Blogger”, crap that you read about from the “Blog Snobs” out there.

Another Adsense cheque is in the off’ing, so we shall see I might crack $1K for profits on the web site this year. Whoo Hoo, almost above slave wages!

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