I recently blogged about my efforts to move from TypePad to Blogger. My friend Brian pointed out that Google just announced a set of tools to convert to or from popular blog export formats, including MovableType which uses the same file formats as my TypePad. The converters are open source, distributed under the Apache license, so you can download the code and run them on your local machine. Or, if your blog isn’t too big, you can run the code hosted on AppEngine by going to
- http://movabletype2blogger.appspot.com/
- http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/
- http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/
Well I tried this with my blog, and the resulting file it spit out was almost empty. I think my blog is just a bit too large, since when I ran it on my local machine it came out to 1.03 megs. So if your blog is smaller than mine you can probably use the online tool.
After a couple of bX-xji785 errors, the file imported into blogger about as well as could be expected, which is to say okay but not great. The blog is mostly there. Feel free to take a peak at http://leo-embracingchaos.blogspot.com/ but please don’t make any permanent links to that URL as it’s really just for testing. The posts and drafts all made it with the right dates and times, along with the comments and tags. But as previously noted, the TypePad export format does not include URLs. So if I were to actually use this conversion, all the inbound links to pages other than the homepage of my blog would break, which is totally unacceptable for me.
I started a thread on the discussion group if you’d like to follow along.