What is the technical reason why can't I migrate my Blogger account?

January 12, 2007 4:21 PM

What is the technical reason why can't I migrate my Blogger account?

I've been using Blogger since mid-2001 and my blog has 4685 posts. Blogger have said that they're not able to allow the migration of larger blogs. I was initially slightly annoyed because it seems to mean that newer users will be able to move over whilst us old loyal timers have to wait, I understood that it was for some technical reason which isn't made clear on their information page.

I was wondering then if anyone had heard what the technical reason was for why larger blogs can't be shifted over now, especially since I'm being given the option on Dashboard then being told that I can't.

posted by feelinglistless to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Migrate to where? Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, there may be more than one way to do it.
posted by cortex at 4:24 PM on January 12, 2007

I'm guessing that Blogger exports your blog using a plain-text format like Movable Type's export format (it's been a long time since I've used Blogger). That being the case, it wouldn't be surprising that Blogger would have trouble disgorging a single text file that long.

It is certainly a PITA, but what you could do is this: set up your template to produce the same output as the export format would, and spit out your blog, say, 100 posts at a time through it. Collect all these and then import them to your new blogging system With MT or WP, you can do multiple imports and everything will work out.
posted by adamrice at 4:32 PM on January 12, 2007

4685 posts!

Yeah, it would be the big-ish file that would be produced. Estimate 10KB per post (this depends on how long winded you are), and thats ~45 MB.

I've never used blogger, but if they won't let you export, you could download the rss feed, and use a script to convert it to MT or whatever format. There are plenty of good rss parsers out there that would make this somewhat easy.
posted by nazca at 5:08 PM on January 12, 2007

In the old Blogger, when you published a new post, the system would write 3 or 4 new static html pages: the post page itself, the new front page containing the post, the monthly archive page, and maybe one or two others I can't think of offhand.

In the new Blogger, the data gets written to a database, and all of the above pages are generated dynamically at each visit, like with Wordpress or other more recent blogging systems.

I don't know exactly how the migration process works, but I assume the system goes through all the static pages and extracts the posts. This would certainly be taxing for a blog of your size, so I imagine they want to space people like you out and do the migrations only when they have the processing power to spare.
posted by Partial Law at 5:14 PM on January 12, 2007

Are you using Blogger to manage a blog on your own server or is this a blogspot site?
posted by bshort at 5:28 PM on January 12, 2007

Is it a team blog? That's the reason I can't migrate mine yet. Supposedly they're still working on adding support for migrating those blogs.
posted by clarahamster at 5:31 PM on January 12, 2007

Migrate to where? Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, there may be more than one way to do it.

I'm guessing the asker means migrate to "New Blogger", which as far as I can tell means your Blogger account is now linked to your Google account.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:37 PM on January 12, 2007

Would BackupMyBlog help at all?
posted by JPowers at 12:47 AM on January 13, 2007

Is it a team blog? That's the reason I can't migrate mine yet. Supposedly they're still working on adding support for migrating those blogs.

I have a team blog and migrated mine in December 2006.
posted by Tuwa at 6:16 PM on January 16, 2007