I have spent hours today trying to get my old WordPress (2.0) blog upgraded to version 2.3.3 so I could export the xml file that this hosted version of the blog needs.
Once I managed the upgrade (ftp kept failing) the transfer to WordPress.com was effortless. Just one thing to note though, before all the posts were imported I was told I had to rename the author from richard to richardradio which is obviously my wordpress.com user name. I soon fixed that though by changing nickname in the user profile.
I was disappointed that my blogroll links didn’t make it in. But that wasn’t enough to stop me make the changeover, Later I pulled the opml blogroll off the old blog and imported it separately.
Note that although I haven’t switched the domain over at the time of writing, it looks like the domain mapping is free as I already own richardradio.com all I have to do is point the ns record at wordpress.com – easy again.
[Correction I have to pay $10 annually for this]
I still have to: Upload (or relink) some of the attachments that appear in old posts – they didn’t get included in the export.
All in all I’m very pleased with the transfer, as someone who is not programming or messing about with hosting companies every day it’s a huge burden off my mind that I won’t have to to touch .htaccess files, ftp and phpmyadmin again to keep wordpress running.
