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How to redirect Blogger Beta to Wordpress.com (Laffers.net)
This was originally a post at Laffers.net, but I’m getting constant timeouts to that site, so I’m going to repost it here, just in case Laffers.net has gone down.
This copy was captured by the Google Cache as it appeared on 24 Dec 2009 04:44:07.
I refer to this article in the following two posts of mine:
So you want to move from Blogger to a WordPress blog & Things I learnt when migrating from Blogger
If you are like me and have decided to move your blog from blogspot.com to wordpress.com (the shared Wordpress hosting site), you are asking yourself three questions:
- How to redirect visitors to the old blog automatically to the new pages.
- How to transfer the PageRank of your old blog to the new one.
- How to prevent being penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Is it possible ? Read on.
First of all, let me give credit where credit is due – there are some instructions already published
- Tom Sherman has a nice manual for moving from the old Blogger to self-hosted Wordpress.
- TechCounter similar to the one above but contains erroneous information about preserving PageRank.
- Webbleyou is a tutorial for migrating from Blogger Beta, but I find it unnecessarily complicated.
Bottomline: None of those tutorials work for moving to the shared hosting on Wordpress.com!
how to do it
Here are the answers to the three questions:
- Redirect your visitors by combining JavaScript and meta tag redirects. Read below.
- Bad news, this is not possible. Tom Sherman correctly states
This would require a 301 Permanent Redirect and access to the server, not provided by Blogger.
- If you don’t want to be punished by Google for duplicating content you must remove the old blog from the Google cache and tell it to ignore the old site from now on. Read below below.
set up redirects
I’m assuming that at this point you have imported your posts to the new blog at Wordpress.com (if not, go to "Manage/Import", select the obvious choice and do what you’re said).
Log into your Blogger account and click your way through the awkward navigation menu until you are at the "Template/Edit HTML" page. To redirect visitors from the main page, insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:
<meta content='6;url=http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>
Number 6 means that the redirection will take effect after 6 seconds. Replace the url with your own.
The tricky part comes now. We want to redirect users from individual post pages to the corresponding post pages on the new blog. For that, we need a piece of JavaScript spiced with Blogger proprietary tags. Insert the following right after "<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>" in the template:
<b:widget id='Redirector' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var new_page='yournewblog.wordpress.com/';
var permalink = '<data:post.url/>';
var timestamp = '<data:post.timestamp/>';
timestamp = timestamp.split('/');
timestamp = timestamp[2]+'/'+timestamp[0]+'/'+timestamp[1];
new_page = permalink.replace(/youroldblog\.blogspot\.com\/2007\/[0-9]{2}/,new_page+timestamp);
new_page = new_page.replace(/\.html$/,'');
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
Don’t forget to enter your new blog’s URL at var new_page = .
Important note! For this script to work, all your posts should have been imported to Wordpress.com using their Manage/Import function. The creation dates of all posts must match, because they are part of the permalinks.
remove duplicate content
Insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>
After seeing this, search engines should remove your old blog from their cache and the old content will stop existing for them. Therefore they are not going to penalize your new blog for duplicate content.
optionally, display a message
This is not required, but helpful for your readers. Tell them that you have moved and that they are going to be redirected. Right after the <body> tag, insert this:
<div style='position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;'>
<p><strong>My blog has moved!</strong></p>
<p>You should be automatically redirected in 6 seconds. If not, visit<br/> <a href='http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/'> <strong>http://yournewblog.wordpress.com</strong></a> <br/> and update your bookmarks.</p>
</div>
Well, now we are set. Found any errors in this tutorial or have more tips? Share them in the comments please. 
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
© 2005-2008 richard laffers
Hotlinking Thieving Bastard
![core77_milan_coffee1[3]_2](http://blog.wisefaq.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/core77-milan-coffee13-2.gif "core77_milan_coffee1[3]_2")
I was chuffed that someone linked to my “What coffee drink is that” post. I first saw the chart at another blog, so I grabbed a copy of it. My post wasn’t that great, but I liked the chart. So did someone else. They linked directly to the image on my server.
The thieving bastard.
2 reasons to direct link (hot link) to a image:
- save bandwidth on your server, as the web browser will load the image from someone elses server, and/or
- you’re a lazy bastard.
So what this meant was that every visitor to their website, was downloading the image from my website., and they didn’t know it.
It wasn’t that this thieving bastard couldn’t store the image on his blogger site. He was just lazy.
I can now understand why Andy was so peeved (link NSFW). And while Andy’s BBC image is a good one, I’ve decided to show this image to hotlink-ers:
The technical jiggery-pokery is done by modifying .htaccess to block hotlinking.
Instructions to do that can be found here:
How to Embarrass RSS Scrapers Who Hotlink to Your Images
Link Checker – another WordPress plugin
Link Checker is designed to crawl though your blog, verifying that the links you’ve linked to are still there.
Now my utility of choice is Xenu, and I blogged about it here. Not that there is anything wrong with Xenu, I just noticed Link Checker* and thought I’d give it a spin.
So, the results?
Took about 10 minutes to scan 2385 links, which seems ok.
Now you can leave the plugin Activated, and every 72 hours (default), when you login to the Admin panel, it will run. I’m going to de-activate it, and only run it every couple of weeks.
* first heard it while looking at Pelf Nyok’s Pelf-ism is contagious blog. If you’re interested in turtles, it’s worth a visit.
Quick fix: WordPress Mobile browsing.
With the latest release of Windows Mobile 6.5 Windows Phone 6.5, the Internet Explorer Browser identifies itself as:
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Windows Phone 6.5)
which broke the WordPress Mobile Edition browsing.
Now fixed.
Make it go faster – Expires Headers
Or, Wisefaq now tells your web browser that it’s ok to cache graphics (GIF/PNG/JPG/JPEG/ICO), Javascript and CSS.
“This would be important because??”, you ask.
Well when you visit again, your web browser will use it’s copies of the graphics/Javascript/CSS, instead of downloading them again.
A win for you (speed), and me (bandwidth).
Hooray for us!
So how did I manage this?
Wisefaq sits on an Apache web server. (more…)
Equipment Superior To User
I had to change an email account password in CPanel, and I could not get my email client to connect to the mail server.
In the end, I proved that CPanel and my email client were much smarter than me.
This was what I did:
- First went in the change password screen:
- Hit the generate password button
(more…)
Blog updated to Atahualpa theme v3.4.2
Let me know if anything broke …
Make it go faster – Enabling GZip Compression
Things were getting slow around here, as you can see with the results from ismyblogworking.com.
Now WordPress, in versions before WordPress 2.5, had a GZip compression option. It was removed in v2.5 because WordPress thought it was better to implement compression at the OS level. All fine and good, but by default, my hosting provider does not do compression.
The quick performance fix was to enable compression. But how???
WordPress 2.8.2
Some minor changes to the blog:
- WordPress 2.8.2
- Fixed WordPress Mobile Edition problem.
- Enabled GZip page compression (have written more about this the "Make it go faster!" post).
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