Recently I’ve been wondering what to do with the posts on my old blog(s). Before setting up shop here at RickMahn.com, I had tried out MSN Spaces, Blogger, and then WordPress.com. Each of which allowed me to learn more about what blogging is, introduced me to the blogosphere, and let me experiment with different platforms. As I learned more about the tools, I started to settle on the platform that seemed to work best for me. That was WordPress. The experience over at WordPress.com convinced me that it was the best blogging platform for me – though I wanted to have full control of the system, server, etc… so I ended up setting up my own hosted WordPress installation.
A recent post by Kent Newsome got me thinking about it, though I’ve not the same problem that he describes. I was kind of testing the waters and since I was not a pioneer in blogging, or even a real early adopter, I’ve the luxury of being able to find out what everyone else’s opinions of the free sites, the pay sites, and the “go it your own way” crowd thinks about all the blogging choices. And taking that all in, I’m glad that I can sort of start from scratch with my system of choice and work toward the future.
Now Kent is right, it will probably be up to WordPress to create a good migration tool to support migrating from a different platform to WordPress as large companies like Blogger (Google) stand to loose ad revenue from people leaving their system and want to discourage anyone from doing so. Of course WordPress has an Import utility which should word for my needs, but would not work for Kent’s as he has a lot of history on his site and would need to keep the permalinks to all existing content. And that is the real challenge, not just to Import existing posts & comments, but to migrate them in such a way as to keep all the links alive and functioning for reference, search bots, etc…
This is an opportunity for some enterprising programmer to come up with a migration tool to support the major blogging platforms. As time goes on, each platform will win or loose user favor and one thing should be simple – the migration of a blog from one platform to another. Anyone going to take up the challenge?
