In the last post on Moving from Typepad to Wordpress, I gave the outline of pains of migrating from Typepad to Wordpress. Lets continue where I left in the last post.

Lets talk about the following 5 issues and how I solved them here.

1. Typepad uses short weired urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s
2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t
3. Typepad blog name is problematic ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1’ - the second part ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after the slash in the URL host name is the name you choose when you were setting up your blog on Typepad.
4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com
5. All the file links and logo links are still pointing to typepad.com

1. Typepad uses short wiered urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s

Lets take an example for a post, url generated by Typepad is ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html’ while this post is imported in Wordpress, the URL generated by Wordpress would be ‘http:// hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/18/gps-that-never-fails/’ provided that permalinks are enabled in Wordpress. That is where wordpress slug feature comes to the rescue. Wordpress lets you manually assign a post slug to any post, which overrides automatically Wordpress generated SEO friendly post slug.

However, you have to manually open each post in wordpress and assign it a post slug manually. I copied the old Typepad post slug ‘gps_that_never_’ in the Post slug box on the post management page. Now the URL generated by Wordpress was ‘http:// hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/18/gps_that_never_/’. Looks like that we are getting closer.

2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t

Next step is adding .html at the end of all URL’s automatically and getting rid of that last ‘/’. Also in the posts URL structure Typepad is using /Year/Month/ while the default for Wordpress is /Year/Month/Day/, so will be dropping this /Day part from the URL generation as well.

We can achieve this simply by configuring the Wordpress’s permalink generating structure and customizing it. Tell Wordpress to generate custom structure using the following string ‘/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’. We have done 3 things here. We have removed the /%day% , added the .html to the end of each URL and removed the postfix ‘/’ from each URL.

After updating the Permalink structure, now the finished URL is ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html’ - Hurray, this is what we wanted.

3. Typepad blog name is problematic ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley’ - the second part ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after the ‘/’ in the URL host name is the name you choose when you were setting up your blog on Typepad.

Solution for this is very simple. I simple choose to install the Typepad software in a subdirectory named ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ instead of installing in the root web directory and that did the trick because automatically ads the subdirectory name as part of the URL.

Another way this problem could have been solved would be by modifying the permalink custom structure in Wordpress, if you had installed the wordpress in the web root directory of the server. The Custom Structure for permalinks would be ‘/hotfromsiliconvalley/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’, and that will inject ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after hostname in the URL.

4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com

For this the solution is a search and replace operation on the text file which was exported by Typepad. You have to this before you import this file in Wordpress. In your favorite text editor search for ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007’ and replace it with ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007’ throughout the document and that should do the trick. Repeat the same for all with the other years 2006, 2005 and so on. This ensures the image URL’s are not automatically replaced in this operation and they will continue to point to Typepad, which we can replace next.

To be continued in next post…

After initially starting out with ‘hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com’, for quite a while I’ve been using my own domain name ‘www.hotfromsiliconvalley.com’ for my Typepad blog, my first blog. When I decided to move from Typepad to Wordpress, I had thought that moving from the Typepad to Wordpress would be simple, easy and straight forward. Why - because Typepad allows you to export your whole blog to a text while, and Wordpress supports importing your Typepad blog. Since I owned my own domain name, I would retain my Google page-rank and all the inbound links will remain intact. Right? Oh! I was so very wrong.

If you are the text only blogger than nothing to worry about, provided you have your own custom domain name. Not me, well I use lot of audio (podcasts), photos and logos. I had approximately 300 media rich posts on my Typepad blog. Exporting the content of the blog from the Typepad in a human readable text file was the only easy part and takes less than a minute. Now I imported this text file in Wordpress by going to Manage - Import - Movable Type and TypePad, and volla, in less than 5 minutes, I had all my posts including comments and trackbacks show up in Wordpress. And that is where the easy part ends and my jaw drops. Why?

1. Typepad uses short weired urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s
2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t
3. Typepad blog name is problametic ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1’ - the second part ‘blog1’ after the slash is the name you choose when setting up your blog, and it is required that you have something here
4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com
5. All the file links and logo links are still pointing to typepad.com
6. Typepad uses /year/month/my_post_url.html format for generating URL’s while the wordpress permalink uses /year/month/day/my-post-url-that-is-seo-friendly
7. Typepad does not give me an option to export my media files
8. Typepad does not let me export my pictures (or I couldn’t find it at least)
9. Even though, I am using my custom domain name, all posts are still accessible using ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1′ url and there is no way to switch it off
10. Typepad does not allow me set up a permanent 301 redirect from old Typepad.com address to my mydomain.com

Basically Typepad is telling me not to leave and stay on Typepad.com for ever. If you do not have your own custom domain name like ‘yourdomain.com’, your blog link life will end here if you decide to migrate as all the links will become orphan, and you have to start all over again.

Well Wordpress came to the rescue. Many many thanks to Matt of Wordpress and the Wordpress community for making Wordpress so flexible. A few surgical tweaks in Wordpress, a few plugins for firefox, a few plugins for Wordpress and I was in business.

OpenSource rocks. Geeks rock. I am in love with Wordpress and FireFox. Wordpress Community and Firefox Community which helped with with the transition.

How I handled these pains, problems and issues?

To be continued in the next post…