Getting a Blogroll from Blog Desk to Blogger to Wordpress

Situation: Had a ton of links and blogs but didn't want to spend the time laboriously copy/pasting them into Wordpress.

Before, the solution was to create a page full of links when I was reviving an old wordpress blog I'd exported.

Did some homework this time.

Found a nice how-to over at Blogger-in-Draft, which tells you how to get them exported out of Google Reader.

So a simple work-around was to open each one of them up in Firefox, then subscribe to the feed in Google Reader. That way, I had all my feeds in one place.

Then I followed their instructions and had this nice OPML file which imported just dandy.

Trouble was - it sent everyone to my shared Google Reader folder where the RSS feeds were kept.

I wanted to actually give hard links on the other site pages so that the Search Engines would share the link love.

So: more research.

Found this nice on-page script that ran just great in order to turn HTML to OPML. Because was was interesting is that this list showed up as links in html, but would send the browser over to Google Reader instead. Well, at least one version I found after I'd imported it into WP.

Solution: This meant I scraped the page of links and then pasted it into a new OpenOffice HTML document, saved it and viewed the source.

Pasting this source into that last linked script gave me a workable blogroll (finally.)

But it's great to be able to take 35 links at one pop and import them back into all those blogs so they could share the wealth with each other. One quick import and I was done.

Recipe:

1. Subscribe to all the RSS feeds through Firefox.
2. Convert your Google Reader feeds to OPML.
3. Import once into a WP blog.
4. Scrape this and paste into OpenOffice to get an HTML doc.
5. Convert HTML doc to OPML and test import. (Tweak in text editor to taste.)
6. Import into all the WP blogs you want to, via their Import function (under Tools in 2.9)

And having gone through that, I'm sharing it with you.