Migrating from Serendipity to WordPress Using Windows Live Writer

After months of inactivity, myGUIDE is now back with a new look and running on a different weblog platform. Yes, you read it right, I changed my blog platform from Serendipity to WordPress. This means that although I have migrated all my previous posts to WordPress, previous links will no longer work since Serendipity and WordPress have different link structure. Now if you’re looking for a particular post, you can still find it here. Just use the search box to locate it.

How did I do it? It was quite easy. Thanks to Windows Live Writer (WLW). But before taking this approach, be warned that this may not be appropriate for your case. This worked for me because myGUIDE is relatively new and has only a small number of blog entries and I’ve been using WLW to post entries to this blog. A Serendipity importer plugin is already available for WordPress. So maybe you’re better off using the plugin. But if you want an alternative approach, you can try this one.

The first thing to do is to create a weblog account in WLW to access your Serendipity-based blog, if you have not done it yet. Then setup another account in WLW to access your WordPress blog. After doing this, you’re ready to go. Simply read your blog entries, one at a time, from your old blog using WLW, then switch to your new blog, and click the Publish button to publish the entry you just retrieved. It is that easy! You can also use WLW to create the relevant categories in your new blog. You can even set the published date so that you can keep the original date of your posts.

But there are limitations to this approach. First, you will lose all your comments. WLW will not read the comments associated to each post.  Second, WLW sometimes will not download the images in the post. Instead it will just get the link of the image from your original blog and use this link in the new one. Thus if you’ll remove your old blog, the images will also disappear. Finally, if you have many entries, transferring all of them can take some time since you have to manually repeat the process of reading your previous posts from Serendipity then publishing it to WordPress. Luckily for me, I have only 15 entries so this was not an issue. 😉

And that’s it!