As instant as technology makes life seem, sometimes it leaves more “?” in its wake than we humans expect.
I am in the throes of moving this wowaboutlife blog from one platform to another… going from TypePad to WordPress… and wow! what an undertaking. All my images have been replaced with “?” until I can relink… Every. Single. Image.
The Easy Part:
Before I began, I did the research, via Google, natch, reading heartfelt warnings from earlier pioneers who’d made their way through sleepless nights, mazes of code and missing data. Did I heed their advice to turn it over a cyber-wizard? Of course not! After all, their war stories were ancient history from 2009, with the worst tales going far back in pre-history to 2005.
Confident in 2010 that our super-modern technology would serve me well, I embarked with nary a quiver, trusting that all my data would move over without a snag. TypePad and WordPress have made it amazingly easy to manage the process. Click in your blog’s “Settings” panel on TypePad and they happily Export a compact little .txt file to your computer. After you download WordPress 3.0.x to your host/server, you click again in “Tools” and choose Import to add the plug-in for TypePad , then point it to the file you have on your computer, and it uploads quite speedily.
All the text arrived safely, if a little out of sorts, with pages being converted to posts. No biggie to copy and paste and create new pages.
The Tricky Part:
It turns out that both the pioneers, and even TypePad’s warnings were true: Images will not transfer, period. I can see how difficult this would make life for many people, who may have linked to images living on Flickr or elsewhere. It is absolutely necessary to re-link after that fact. If you don’t know where those images are now, you are out of luck.
I did get sort of cyber-punked though.
