I had been thinking about moving away from Blogger to my own domain. Finally, I decided to give in and I was fortunate enough to buy this domain. Blogger has been a simple service but I wanted to try the new kids Tumblr or Posterous. After spending some time fiddling with both of them, I decided to go with Tumblr.

It took me some time to figure out the right way to move from Blogger. I used the import script written by Jonathan Tron to import my old posts. Sadly, there is no way to import comments from blogger. The least I could do was to import them into disqus and link the same disqus account into tumblr; which actually does not help much.

The bigger issue was to migrate without leaving RSS subscribers in the lurch. The slightly lesser issue was to preserve my earlier blog’s Google page rank.

The first issue was solved easily. You can do the same with the following sequence of steps.

1. Create a Feedburner account and import your blogger feed.
2. Set your blogger feed to redirect to Feedburner.
3. Edit your tumblr theme and replace the RSS link to point to feedburner
4. Edit your feedburner to import from tumblr’s rss

The second was slightly more tricky. The right way to move a website to a different domain is to use permanent redirects from the old page to the new page. However, Blogger (obviously) does not allow you to do that. Thankfully, Google recently announced support for specifying  canonical links which can point to the preferred version of a URL. So, I hacked up a script to match pages of blogger’s RSS with tumblr’s RSS and generate conditional blogger template snippets which let me specify the canonical (tumblr) URL for each page on my Blogger account.

I couldn’t redirect so I had to fall back on meta-refresh to redirect anyone visiting an old page to the new page. I hate to break the back button like this but that was the only possible way in this case. This is what it looked like:

I used to think that blogging is a solved problem. After doing all this and trying out many service, I don’t believe that anymore.