jroller to WordPress migration

I got bored with the interface of roller on jroller.com, I decided to switch to WordPress. One of the features I love about WordPress is the import/export feature. But I needed a way to export my existing roller blog (a feature that isn’t yet implemented in roller).

A little googling for migrate roller weblogger to wordpress led me to this article: Migrating a Roller blog to WordPress. The author’s custom template works for generic RSS. While WordPress can use this format, I had better success using the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) format.

As the author states

“…because while WordPress can import posts from your feed it cannot import the post comments. Nothing against WordPress, the RSS 2.0 specification does allow a comments subelement but that can only be a link to the actual comments page. So basically we need to defy them all, add the comments inline in our custom RSS Feed and then modify the wordpress RSS Import Utility to decipher and import the comments as well.”

with my modifications you don’t have to modify the wordpress importer at all, which means you can use this on wordpress.com as well.

Here is what I did:

• add a new template, “WordPress export”
• click the edit icon next to the template
• change the Link to “wpexport.xml”
• paste in this template
• click Save button
• click Done button
• Proceed to download

Now you are ready to download the xml file and import into WordPress.

wget http://jroller.com/page/*your_blog_name*/wpexport.xml

Once you have the xml file, import into WordPress

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