Blogger export does not export anything that is usable by any other program. There are programs that convert the exported xml file to a WordPress export file, but they don’t work with my file. Either my file is too big or there are bugs in the programs. WordPress will not import from my blogger account directly.

I have one or two more things to try, but unless I can find the WordPress format and figure out what is in the blogger format so I can make a conversion program I am out of luck on this one.

AHA! Success

Here’s what I had to do. First, you need a hosting company that will let you run long scripts. 1and1.com failed me here and I had to use a domain at HostGator. You get what you pay for in this case.

Log into your blogger account and turn off archiving (this is a magic step. I don’t know what difference it makes.) You do this by going into the archiving tab and setting the frequency to none.

I had to switch blogger from FTP publishing to a BlogSpot domain. This is only temporary. Save your settings on BlogSpot .

Open the WP admin page and click on import/blogger. You will have to refresh your credentials because WordPress remembers the results of the last time that you tried this.

You should see your posts and comments.

Click import and after 5 or ten minutes you have a newly imported blog.

Go back into blogger and set archiving back to monthly (or whatever) and reset the publish method back to FTP. All of my settings were there and I did not need to retype anything.

My next step will be to export the mySQL tables from HostGator and import them into the 1&1 database so I can continue to host the blog at 1&1.

I will spend a few hours next week converting the blogger template to a WP template. I will also install all of the SEO tools.

The only bad thing is that I will have a big issue with the names of the blog pages. They will be different in WP than in Blogger. It will require lots of redirects so as not to lose the inbound links to various posts. I may make a program to do this.