Blogger vs WordPress Blog

With TravelPod closing, some TravelPod members may wish to move their blogs to an active blogging platform to continue writing or to keep their travel blogs on the web for others to read. While there are many great services out there, the most popular is WordPress.

First, you'll want to download your TravelPod archive by visiting your TravelPod Dashboard. (See our post about the archive and download process here.) In your archive, you'll find XML files that can be used to import your blog content into a new blogging platform. These files have been optimized for WordPress.

WordPress offers both a hosted option (which runs on the wordpress.com domain) as well as an easy installer that allows you to run the WordPress software on any Internet Service Provider that supports PHP. On their hosted version, WordPress has both free and paid products, one of which should suit your needs.

The importing of TravelPod blogs to WordPress will be relatively straightforward for someone with medium experience with blogging tools. On WordPress, as with TravelPod, each of your TravelPod trips would become its own separate blog. You can import as many of your trips as you like, by creating a new blog and importing the content to it.

The following instructions should help you get started with your TravelPod content on WordPress.com:

WordPress Import Instructions

First, if you haven't already, create an account on WordPress.com. You'll be asked for basic login information and asked to pick a name for your blog and a template. Pick any template you like, you can always change it later.

Next, you'll see an admin screen similar to this one:

The "First blog post" is a placeholder post that you can leave alone for the time being. Later, you'll want to delete it.

For importing, go to Settings (lower-left menu option).

If you click on Import at the top, you'll see this page, where you can choose which type of import file to use. We have optimized the import file for WordPress, so choose that option by clicking Start Import.

Now you can either drag the appropriate XML file from your TravelPod archive to the big empty rectangular target area, or just click there to navigate to the file on your hard drive.

WordPress will recognize your XML file as an import file, and let you know that all content in the blog will be assigned to you. (Since TravelPod blogs only have one author, this should make no difference to you.) Click Start Import again to begin the import process.

The next step is the longest part of the process, where WordPress imports the file and turns your entries into WordPress posts. It may seem like nothing is happening, but in fact, WordPress is processing your file in the background. When you see the message Finishing up the import, you can go do something else as it processes. WordPress will email you when the import is complete.

Once you get the confirmation that the import is done, click over to your new blog and check it out. You'll see that we have included both published entries (now called "posts" in WordPress lingo) as well as drafts, which have been marked as draft in WordPress.

Next, import your images. For technical reasons, we are not able to import images to your WordPress blog from the XML file in the archive. You will need to insert them in your WordPress blog from the Images folder that is part of the archive.

There are many ways to do this, but the fastest way to get started is to upload all of the photos at once to your WordPress Media Library. Go to your blog and click on Media in the left hand column.

The photos from your blog are stored within the blog folder in your archive. You can simply drag and drop all of the photos into the Media Library page, and they will automatically start uploading to WordPress. Once there, you can use the WordPress blog post editor to place photos into your blog entries from the Media Library.

A word about videos:

TravelPod saves your videos as flv files, and this format is unfortunately not supported by WordPress.

You can use a third-party tool like Handbrake or Adobe Media Encoder to convert your flv files into a format accepted by WordPress, such as mp4.Please note that you must pay for a Premium account on WordPress to upload videos to the Media Library. Video uploads are not supported in the Free or Personal plans. You can, however, embed videos from other sites such as YouTube.

Source: WordPress Import Intructions