How to import Posterous to self-hosted WordPress

February 17, 2013 By

With the news that Posterous will be closing on April 30, 2013, many people are now looking to export their content and start to publish on a different platform. We tend to always recommend self-hosting if your site is important to you and your business, partly because third-party services can close or change, and partly because it gives you a lot more control over backups.

WordPress is particularly suited to self-hosting, as it’s so widely used and most hosting services will offer a simple one-click install to get you up and running. The complications tend to come with adjusting the look and functionality to exactly what you require, and that’s certainly something we can help with.

So assuming you don’t want to move from Posterous to another third party service like WordPress.com, Tumblr etc, what do you need to do?

 

Setting up self-hosted WordPress:

To set up your site, you need 2 things. The first is your domain name, if you don’t have one already. The second is your hosting account, and for most sites this can be organised quickly for a few pounds per month.

If that is already filling you with fear, give us a shout as we run hosting a number of websites, including installing WordPress, setting up themes and plugins, and organising regular backups.

Once that’s in place, you’ll need to wait for the hosting to be up and running to allow you to install WordPress. Once that’s done, you can then transfer your content across. When that’s complete, the final step will be to change any existing domain names to point to your new site.

You now have 2 options for getting your content into your new site – one doesn’t require a Posterous export, but we’ll cover it anyway as it’s good practice to always keep a secure backup on your computer or an external hard drive.

 

Exporting from Posterous:

Log into your Posterous account, and you’ll see a bright yellow ‘BackUp’ button in the top right of the dashboard. Clicking on that will arrange for a backup to be created for export (You’ll need to wait a little while for it to be ready). Once it’s prepared, you’ll see a green ‘Download’ option which will export your existing content.

BadgerGravlingPosterousBackUp

This will let you download a Zip file which contains contains your content.

 

Importing into self-hosted WordPress:

Option 1: Using a Plugin:

There’s a useful Posterous Importer plugin available which will import posts, comments, tags, and attachments directly via the Posterous API. Simply go to the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard, select ‘Add New’ and search for Posterous Importer and you should see it as the first result (Authors include Automattic, the company which runs WordPress).

Once this is installed and activated, you’ll then be able to go to Tools in your WordPress dashboard, select Import, and Posterous will now be a listed option.

Click on Posterous, enter the url of your current Posterous site, along with your username and password, and the import will begin when you click submit.

PosterousImport

Hopefully that will work for you nice and easily. You’ll then need to go through and check each post, amending author details etc as required.

If it doesn’t work for any reason, there is a slightly more complicated alternative.

 

Option 2: Importing via WordPress.com

If that doesn’t work, the other option is to use the importer created for WordPress.com, and then export from that version to your self-hosted site.

So you just need to sign up at WordPress.com (Which is the hosted version of WordPress). Once that’s done, look in the Tool section of your new site, and then click on the Posterous import option.

This method will now ask you to upload the wordpress_export_1.xml file from your Posterous export earlier. This will then be uploaded to your WordPress.com site. There’s a more detailed tutorial on the WordPress.com site, so I won’t repeat their instructions.

Once that’s done, you can then choose to export from WordPress.com. And then go to your self-hosted site, select Tools and the WordPress importer. Choose the .xml file to upload from your WordPress.com export, and you should be all set.

Obviously this version does include a couple of extra steps which are a bit of a pain, but could be useful if the Posterous API stops working prior to April 30.

 

Finishing off the process:

Finally, once all your content is in your new site, spend some time checking the author names, embedded videos and anything else which may have changed during the import process. If you’ve got thousands of posts, then start with any that you know are particularly popular!

If you’re mapping an existing domain name across to your new site, now’s the time to do it. If you want to keep the same url structure and avoid losing any links, you’ll need to go to ‘Settings’ and select the ‘Permalinks’ option. The default setting for Posterous appears to be ‘Post Name’, which displays as http://danthornton.net/sample-post/ for example.

Finally you can play around with the look of your site, and the additional extensions that are available to WordPress users.

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The best way to publish RSS feeds to Twitter?

October 20, 2009 By

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Twitterfeed

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

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Google help with changing blog platforms

January 12, 2009 By

As someone who moved this blog from Blogger to the current self-hosted WordPress location back in April, I’m keenly aware of the problems you can encounter if you switch blogging platforms.

As a result, I’d defintely advise starting with WordPress, but if you’re not ready to host your own site (It’s really far more simple than it sounds!), then you’re limited to WordPress.com, which has all the functionality, but doesn’t allow you to display any advertising – a pain if you’re trying to see if something might drive some revenue, for example!

And while there are some very well-respected people using Blogger (such as Dave Cushman at Faster Future), and some good resources for some nice templates (such as BloggerBuster), I’m learning far more from the greater flexibility of WP.

Switching from Blogger should be simple in theory, but having exported, I found I had to import into a WordPress.com blog, then export from that into my hosted version – and even then a lot of posts seemed to get lost en route (They’re still on my old Blogger blog awaiting the remote possibility I’ll find the time to finish manually importing them).

Therefore it’s great news that Google (which owns Blogger), has released Google Blog Convert 1.0. It’s from the fantastically named Data Liberation team, and it’s a new Open Source project to allow you to move blog posts and comments from service to service, including Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type and LiveJournal.

It’s not only great news for anyone considering switching services.

It’s also great news if you want to use the quick and easy implementation of Blogger to get something just up and running with some adverts etc to see if it works, and then switch later.

It certainly means I’m less reluctant about using Blogger to experiment, and I’d be more likely to be enticed back by something suitable.

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Moving from Blogger to WordPress – the saga continues

June 7, 2008 By

Once more I’ve learned a lesson about doing the appropriate research before jumping into something! My move from Blogger to WordPress ran into problems when I tried the feature to ‘auto-import from blogger’ feature, due to the fact I’m with Godaddy hosting. So I had to export from blogger, import into a WordPress.com blog, then export from there and import into my hosted WordPress blog! And even then 6 months of my blog somehow disappeared, and are still being re-added when I have time.

But on top of that I forgot to put a proper redirect for people visiting my old blog, assuming that a post telling them I’d moved, and the lack of new content would see my old blog gently slip under the waves of the Google search…Wrong!

Not only did my old blog continue to rank higher than this one (Google PR4), and still attract visitors, but if they visited an individual post, there was no indication I’d moved. And I suspect all that duplicate content is why this blog still has a Page Rank of 0. Google no like duplicate content.

Tonight, I finally sorted it out, thanks to the excellent ‘How to redirect Blogger Beta to WordPress instructions here. So now my old blog will finally be removed from Google, visitors are automatically redirected, there’s a direct redirect to individual posts where the importing actually worked, and there’s even a public information notice up explaining!

I get there in the end!

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