Migrating all Pinnell blogs to Wordpress

Hello all,

You may have noticed that the various Pinnell web blogs have been looking different lately - this is because I've just moved all the old 4 blogs from Blogger to Wordpress.com

This isn't finished yet and I still need to sort out some problems - for those who are interested here's what's up:

 The old four blogs were:

 www.billpinnell.com

www.ethanpinnell.com

www.tobypinnell.com

and an aggregator blog www.pinnells.com which was meant to be 'your one stop shop for all Pinnell family stuff'

Unfortunately the aggregator stopped working, so did reliable Picasa uploads to blog and life was just too short to maintain all the family blogs seperately - hence I decided to move all blogs to wordpress.com - and consolidate the family ones at the same time - so you end up with:

http://billpinnell.wordpress.com - all my geeky stuff

http://pinnells.wordpress.com - all the photos of the kids and Denise

Ok - so that was the theory but how did I go about it and what's the outstanding issues?

Firstly - though I used blogger for all the websites - I didn't use the 'blogspot' blogger hosting - instead I hosted them on my own domain www.billpinnell.com/

So I transferred all blogs to blogspot hosting so I could use the Wordpress.com 'Magic Import' from Blogger function. Note - this doesn't work if you are hosting your own Blogger blogs.

I also took the opportunity to consolidate all the kids/family blogs into one as required.

This worked a treat and I ended up with the above wordpress blogs  up and running. (note though there are a lot of duplicate entries I need to remove)

I then tackled the issue of redirecting people to new blog:

All four blogs had their own domains associated with them: www.billpinnell.com, www.tobypinnell.com, www.ethanpinnell.com etc

I also had a hosting service at www.billpinnell.com/ to hold all four blogs, including uploaded photos etc. (www.billpinnell.com/index.html was my blog and www.atpinnells.com/oldblogs/Ethan/index.html etc was used for kids)

For the three 'sub blogs' I used web forwarding provided by hosting service to point them at the new http://pinnells.wordpress.com page.

All photos still work on the blog as they link to www.billpinnell.com/uploadedimages/ correctly)

The 4th blog - www.billpinnell.com is causing more problems...

So I can't use web-forwarding on www.billpinnell.com as then though the correct billpinnell.wordpress.com would be used all the links to www.billpinnell.com/uploaded images etc would end up pointing at wordpress directory and not find any of the files.

(Note - I want to keep using www.billpinnell.com/uploadedimages for storing all photos - as you only get 50Mb on Wordpress.com)

Then I read about using a 301 redirect for a specific file - in my case www.billpinnell.com/index.html. This seems ideal as I only care about the one blog/index file.

I made up an .htaccess file at the root of my hosted space. (took ages to find out I could actually do this - never saw it when I used ftp explorer to look at site - only when I used on-line "manage files" option)

redirect 301 /index.html http://billpinnell.wordpress.com/index.html

However, there doesn't appear to such a file at my wordpress.com directory - so I get my blog page up with a big "404 - Not Found" error on it - not what I want.

I tried removing .html, changing it to .php (which works in browser but not in redirect) to no avail.

This can't be the first time someone has tried to do this - I've googled and looked at support forums but I can't  seem to be able to find anyone who has done / is trying to do same as me.

(If you are reading this and can help - that would be really appreciated!)

Will keep you updated on progress.