Inspired? No » Wordpress

Imagine OpenId

Espen Antonsen — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:56:28 +0000

Imagine there’s no logins
It’s easy if you try
No passwords inside us
Outside us a provider
Imagine all the logins
Living for today

Imagine there’s no logins
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no password resets too
Imagine all the logins
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And your login will be as one

Imagine one password
I wonder if you can
No need for secret files and password managers
A brotherhood of providers
Imagine all the logins
Sharing one password

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And your logins will live as one

Using WordPress? Get the OpenID plugin.

Blogger Blogspot To WordPress Redirection plugin

Espen Antonsen — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:17:59 +0000

Download the plugin at WordPress.org

Unfortunately Blogger can not do a proper 301 redirect. It used to do it with a custom domain earlier but now it will return a 301 redirect without a new location and display a ‘do you want to be redirected’ message to visitors. Maybe Google will follow the link, maybe not. Maybe the pagerank will be transferred, maybe not. I don’t know and as I have my doubts I choose another solution, which should be noted is generally not recommended but I feel it is only choice in this case.

Enter the META refresh.

Thought this was something forgotten in 1994 by everyone except news-sites who wants extra pageviews for ad impressions? Oh, no, not with Blogger. As the custom domain 301 is not acceptable solution for me using a meta refresh is the only way to redirect visitors and search engines to my new site. Hopefully Google will follow it to but since this approach is a technique often used by SEO black-hat spammers it might not properly transfer my pagerank to my new domain. Anyway, here’s how to implement:

Go to the layout section. Revert to a class template. Remove all content and insert the following (modify url’s before /redirect to match your new blog url):



 301 Moved Permanently





This page has moved to
">blog.inspired.no/redirect?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>http://blog.inspired.no/redirect/?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>">blog.inspired.no/redirect/?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>>
blog.inspired.nohttp://blog.inspired.no">blog.inspired.no>

This will redirect all request to your blogspot to your new domain to a resource called redirect. This is not found in WordPress but using two plugins we can grab the request and redirect to a proper url. The main plugin is called Blogger Redirector and finds the correct based on the same permalink url used in Blogspot. However since we are using a META refresh on blogspot and there is no way AFAIK to get only the path to the post with the Blogger data fields – just the entire url, we need to redirect using yet another plugin. As there was no such plugin when I started this migration I had to write my own. You can find my plugin ‘Blogger Blogspot To WordPress Redirect’ over at WordPress.org. Basically just install the plugin and follow the instruction for Blogger above.

But there is already a similar plugin called ‘Blogger to WordPress Redirection’?

It redirects to the main page like this:

oldblog.blogspot/my-post => newblog.com => newblog.com/my-post

It is basically saying that the root resource on newblog.com has moved to newblog.com/my-post. Which is not correct. Therefore I prefer using a redirect resource which will redirect to the correct post based on a url with the Blogger permalink: newblog.com/redirect/?url=http://oldblog.blogspot.com/my-post

Also my plugin requires no customization unlike ‘Blogger to WordPress Redirection’ which requires you to edit the plugin php code to work.

Why not just use the ‘Blogger Redirector’?

The required ‘Blogger redirector’ will work perfectly in WordPress if you set up a custom domain. However as mentioned earlier this will display a ‘do you want to be redirected’ message to visitors and not redirect search engines crawlers. If you can live with that then keep the custom domain redirect in Blogger.

Migrate from Blogspot at Blogger to WordPress at custom domain

Espen Antonsen — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:16:10 +0000

I have been using Blogger and hosted my blog at Blogspot since I started blogging almost five years ago. As I signed up to get a virtual server at the excellent Slicehost last month I have now moved my blog to be hosted at my domain inspired.no and will now be using WordPress. In this process I naturally had to migrate my Blogger blog to WordPress and redirect my Blogspot to my domain:

1. Export from Blogger to WordPress.

2. Redirect visitors from Blogspot to new domain.

Content migration is very easy with the excellent import tool in WordPress. Just authorize the request in WordPress in your Blogger account and WordPress will automatically import all posts and comments. Works perfect. Only two minor things to change: Internal links and your own posted comments.

Update all internal links:

Connect to your database in MySQL.

See if you have any internal links directly pointing to your blogspot blog (change the blogspot url to match yours):

select
ID, post_title, replace( post_content,
'href="http://sleepyhead81.blogspot.com/', 'href="/')
from wp_posts where post_content like '%sleepyhead81.blogspot%';

If anything needs to be changed then do the update (change the blogspot url to match yours):

update wp_posts set
post_content = replace( post_content,
'href="http://sleepyhead81.blogspot.com/', 'href="/')
where post_content like '%sleepyhead81.blogspot%';

Update your own post to be linked to your new user in WordPress:

update wp_comments set
user_id = 1, comment_author_email = 'your@email.com'
where comment_author = 'Comment name in Blogger';

That was easy. Now to the painful part. Read part 2 about redirect from blogspot.