Read Reid's Blog

After succesfully importing 3+ years of content (880 posts) from my old Xanga into my this self-hosted WordPress blog, I thought I’d share a few tips about how I did, it since the documentation I had to look through was woefully out of date and somewhat unclear.  You should be able to follow all of these steps and not encounter any difficulties what-so-ever.  This install was for a WordPress blog running version 2.5.1, making it current as of June 8, 2008.

Archive Your Xanga

• Log into your Xanga account and sign-up for a Premium account.  It’s only $4 for one month and it’s a nice way to pay-back Xanga for years of free hosting.
• Once you’ve activated your Premium account, go to your Archive manager (called Weblog Archives off the Home page).  Provided you’ve signed-up for a Premium account, you’ll have the option to create an archive of all your posts.  This file takes a day to create.
• The next day, log-in to your Xanga account and go to your Archive manager.  If your Archive was created, it should look like this:



• Click the “archive.zip” file to download it to your hard drive.  Unzip it, which will provide you with a series of html pages, one for each month you posted.

Prepare your WordPress blog for importing

• Download the Xanga Archive Importer for WordPress at Dan’s Stuff.
• Upload the content into your wp-admin/import folder.  The file name should be, by default, “xanga.php”

Import Xanga into WordPress

• Log-in to your WordPress admin account on your WordPress blog.
• Go to Manage -> Import -> Xanga
• Now, choose a Xanga file from your computer to import.
• Click “Upload File and Import”
• You should get a message that each post was imported successfully.  You have to do this for each html file, which is slightly annoying if you have a very thorough Xanga.
• Luckily, if you import a HTML page that was already imported, you’ll get a message like this:



• Once you’ve imported all of the html pages, you can check out your old posts on your blog.  Comments are also retained, which is pretty sweet.

If you have any questions about how to do this, or have any problems along the way, please let me know!