Moving My Blog from Live Spaces to WordPress

This post is copied from my Live Spaces blog, and was the last post I’ll make there.

I’m finally biting the bullet and moving this blog.  While I’ve had it parked at Live Spaces for over two years now, I’m just not seeing Live Spaces keeping up with the enhancements that others are offering.  After a highly scientific analysis (I found a good tool that would let me grab my posts from Live Spaces and move them to WordPress.), I chose WordPress as the new home.  The new URL is: http://sympmarc.com. (Note the ‘s’.)

WordPress seems to offer much more flexibility and real analytics, which Live Spaces just doesn’t have.  I wanted to stick it out with Microsoft’s attempt in this arena, but I decided that there were greener pastures.

For those who might want to do the same, here is how I did it.  There’s no easy way to get your blog content out of Live Spaces.  (Microsoft certainly doesn’t offer an export utility like many others do.)  Someone named Wei Wei has written and posted a Python script that will export your blog to an XML file which can be uploaded to WordPress.  The code is over at Google Code.  Be sure to follow his instructions well.  You do need to use versions close to what he recommends for his script to run: Python Runtime 2.5.2 and Beautiful Soup 3.0.6.  Python Runtime 2.5.2. wasn’t available for download, but 2.5.4 worked for me.

 

Well, so long Live Spaces.  I’m going to leave things here for a while, but all my new posts will be over at http://sympmarc.com.