Moving from Typepad to WordPress

About one month ago I moved from a Typepad hosted weblog to a WordPress.org hosted weblog. There were a few reasons for this. I wanted to consolidate my blogs. I only have two, but one was on WordPress and this one was on Typepad. This meant that I was paying for two lots of hosting. Also I wanted more control over my blog, ie being able to put stuff where I wanted, using some of the great WordPress plugins and I couldn’t do this on the Typepad plan I was using and I didn’t want to upgrade.

It took me a few months of just thinking about whether I really wanted to do it or not and I finally bit the bullet, sought out a web host and read up on how the best way might be to move my blog so that links still worked. I wish I’d done the move at the same time I bought my own domain which would have made it a bit simpler but it was still doable.

I researched lots on the internet and while there is some information out there everyone has a different story so the articles I found usually didn’t quite fit what I wanted to do and these weren’t as detailed as I would have liked. This is understandable as people don’t have to write detailed how-tos but it would have been nice.

I spent a lot of time finding a WordPress theme I liked. I wanted a clean looking, SEO friendly, three column theme and didn’t feel quite ready to do my own. I ended up using the Seashore free WordPress theme and changed it fairly considerably. While I didn’t want to build my own theme I am quite comfortable fiddling around with stylesheets and templates.

The most applicable set of instructions I found was at scale|free. Instructions at WordPress.org were quite useful also.

• I found a web host I hoped to be happy with, and got a plan where I can have more than one weblog. They have an easy WordPress install feature which takes less than a minute.
• I exported my blog in Typepad (Manage, Import/Export). This feature saves a .txt file. I opened up this file and changed all the jaycee.typepad.com references to www.semanticallydriven.com – a hangover from before I started using my own domain.
• Because I wanted to keep using my blog’s address while I was setting up and testing the new site I had to come up with a domain for testing. scale|free said he added a virtual host and an alias but no manner of researching this and asking questions helped me figure out how to do this so I was lucky that I’ve got a parked domain which I used instead. The downside with this is that when I imported my Typepad content, people thought my blog content was being scraped. I then notified readers that I was moving and testing and to watch out for funny things that might happen.
• Importing the Typepad content was really easy and quick. Then the hard work started.
• WordPress and Typepad use a different permalink structure. Follow these instructions for changing the permalink structure to be what it was.
  • However, some of my Typepad permalinks used dashes and some used underscores. I don’t know why but I guess this is something Typepad did. After I’d imported the blog content, I managed to do a printout of the post names from one of the SQL tables so I could see what WordPress had called them. I then sat down in front of the computer and compared them to what Typepad had called them. To change underscores to dashes I ran this SQL Query on the wp_posts table in the WordPress MySQL database

    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name=REPLACE(post_name, '_', '-')
    WHERE post_date > '2007-21-07'

    So, on Typepad, until 20 July 2007 my posts used underscores in the permalink, then they started using dashes but the import into WordPress and the underscore permalink plugin changed everything to underscores meant I had to change the posts from 21 July onwards to dashes. It took me ages to figure this out and if anyone can see any flaws in this please let me know because I might have it back to front. As with anything like this, do a backup for goodness sake so you can restore if need be.

• When testing, I noticed that my categories had the word ‘category’ in the URL and I didn’t want this. I therefore installed the Top level categories plugin.
• I did as much testing as I could handle while rejigging the theme as mentioned above.
• When I was happy enough with it for releasing I did a backup before I changed the domain name to www.semanticallydriven.com. It takes a day or two for this to make itself known on the web but this has to happen before you can change the original feed details in Feedburner.
• I’d also installed the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin.
• Other plugins I’m using:
  • Do-follow for comments
  • Head META description
  • Popularity contest – lets readers know what other readers have liked
  • Related entries
  • Show top commentators – link love for my commenters
  • Subscribe to comments

I’m still going through the blog and fixing up images as I didn’t copy all my images from Typepad. They might never all be fixed.

I think I lost some RSS subscribers who’d subscribed using Typepad’s RSS feed and not my Feedburner one as my subscriber numbers did drop around this time. Of course, this could be due to other reasons.

My final word of advice to you would be if the thought of doing this frightens you to bits I’d suggest finding someone who can do it for you. It will be worth it. I spent quite a bit of time doing all of this.