Redirecting visitors in an old Blogger blog to new location on wordpress.com

Blog Technical Scale: 5 (if you need it, you’ll do fine)

So,

As part of moving the blog to its new location, I was faced with a minor challenge – redirecting users from my old blogger blog to my new wordpress blog.

The task is pretty trivial if you happen to be a programmer – you just add a redirect code in your old blog headers. But I wanted a little more than that – I wanted people to be redirected correctly, so that if they were viewing a specific post, I’d redirect them to that same post on wordpress.

To make a long story short, I found a few posts on the web describing how to do that, but they were either old or were assuming you are hosting your own wordpress. Eventually, being who I am, I decided to crack it myself. I used an old post from laffer.net, that  and was no longer relevant, but provided big help in setting a direction.

Eventually I managed to do it, so I figured I’d share it here. There’s a good chance that this method will cease to work one day, just life the old method laffer.net had is no longer working. But until then perhaps someone will find it useful. Here’s what you do:

1) Go into your blogger’s admin area. Choose the “design” tab, “Page Elements” (where you see the different blocks that your page is made of).

2) Click on “add a gadget” anywhere and choose the html/javascript gadget.

3) In the screen the just opened, paste the code below in the “content” section, and leave “title” empty.

4) Replace the wordpress and blogger urls from my urls to yours (look for etairaz.wordpress.com and itairaz.blogspot.com).

That’s it. You now have a banner on top of your site that tells people they are about to get redirected in 5 secs, then redirects them.

This is *not* SEO friendly, but I couldn’t care less since I’m not one of those SEO crooks (subject for another post). It won’t work on a browser that doesn’t support Javascript, but again – who cares.

Enjoy!

</pre>
<div style="position: fixed; top: <span class='hiddenSpellError' pre=&quot;&quot;>30px</span>; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"></div>
<pre>
	<div><strong>My blog has moved!</strong></div></pre>
<div>You should be automatically redirected in 5 seconds. If not, visit
<a class="<span class=">redirectLink" href='http://etairaz.wordpress.com/'> <span class="redirectText" style="font-weight: bold; color: #bb0000;">http://etairaz.wordpress.com</span></a>
 and update your bookmarks.</div>
<pre>
</div>

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
function addZero(numberToPad)
{
	return ("0" + numberToPad).slice (-2);
}

var m_wpUrl = 'http://etairaz.wordpress.com/';
var m_published = document.getElementsByClassName('published');
if(m_published.length == 1)
{
	m_published = m_published[0].getAttribute('title');
	var m_pubDate = new Date(m_published);
	var m_url = location.href;
	var m_lastSlash = m_url.lastIndexOf('/');
	var m_lastDot = m_url.lastIndexOf('.');
	var m_postName = m_url.substring(m_lastSlash + 1, m_lastDot);
	if(m_lastDot > 0 && m_postName.indexOf("_archive") < 0) m_wpUrl += m_pubDate.getFullYear() + '/' + addZero(m_pubDate.getMonth() + 1) + '/' + addZero(m_pubDate.getDate()) + '/' + m_postName;

}
//redirect in 5 seconds
window.setTimeout(function(){location.href = m_wpUrl}, 5);

//change text
document.getElementsByClassName('redirectLink')[0].setAttribute('href', m_wpUrl);
document.getElementsByClassName('redirectText')[0].innerText = m_wpUrl;

</script>

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