My Blogs Upgrade Experience

On Saturday, January 12, 2008 4:28 PM I received the following email from Penn State Blogs Pilot [blogs@psu.edu] that said in part:

We are pleased  to announce that the upgrade to Blogs at Penn State  is complete.  Documentation for the new system is at http://blogger.psu.edu/gethelp. Some changes to note

 

1) If you go to http://blogs.psu.edu you will notice two login options in the upper left.

 

* Select "Access Old Blogs from before December 2007"  to login to the old system

* Select "Login to New Blog System" for the new blog system

You will be able to quickly transfer your data between blog platforms  (see "Migration Guide" on http://blogger.psu.edu/gethelp). However you will have to reconfigure your sidebar and select a new style.

My Notes:

1. I was unable to export the text file from my old blog as indicated on Page 7 of the Migration Guide. Since I was using Internet Explorer 7 I would see a File Download - Security Warning for a "mt_cgi" file. Even saving it as a text file would not work along with the steps. Brad Kozlek from the PSU Blogs Pilot (blogs@psu.edu) was able to quickly help me by saving the needed text file for me. Then I could import the data.
2. You need to select your blog to manage it. I was unable to search for terms like Vince Verbeke or keeper. I hadto scroll through the list of PSU blog entries to find mine.  
3. To change the sidebar and the style as indicated in the note, you need to choose Design ... Templates and Design ... Styles choices.
4. Don't rename the "First Widget Manager" to another name. This will cause your Widgets to revert back to a default that is tough to get back. So, leave that name as is, then use the Design ... Widget Sets to remove the unneeded widgets and create your own.