I have moved my blog Travels in a Mathematical World to The Aperiodical!

From its first post (7 Feb 2008) to the most recent (2 April 2013), Travels in a Mathematical World was hosted by Blogger. This was fine, but last year I joined with Katie and Christian to form The Aperiodical and since then it has been an ambition to move the blog over here, for coherence and also because Christian’s custom WordPress setup here is far more capable than the Blogger system.

Anyway, after a lot of procrastination on the topic I have finally sorted out doing this. (Christian helped with this but the delay was mine.) There is a WordPress plugin that will import a Blogger blog. Christian set me up a throwaway WordPress site to have a dummy run and after that went well, and a couple of minor tweaks, we decided to push the button.

This morning the plugin imported 357 posts, comments and images and correct dates and all. So I think we call that a success. You can read the archive of posts in the Travels in a Mathematical World column. This is the first post posted here but not posted there. Brave new world.

I wrote a python script that fetched all the URLs and titles for posts in the ‘Travels in a Mathematical World’ category here. I did the same on Blogger previously, and I will use the two lists when I have a moment to program redirects from the old posts to the new, so that the old URLs still work (at the moment the blog is still mirrored in the old location), including the RSS and atom feeds. This isn’t completely necessary to move here but I am aware of a lot of legacy URLs sitting around the place, not least my database of automated “One from the archive” tweets.

So the moral of the story is: it was easy to move, and we’re on top of the process now so it will be even smoother if there is a next time. The importer deals with other blogging platforms than just Blogger. If you’d like to join us with a column at The Aperiodical and bring your old blog with you, get in touch.