A. CasalenaRelease: The New Blog Importer
Data portability is always a critical feature with every major blogging platform. If you need to move your site, you need to have control over your content-- and that includes the ability to import and export your blog.
Squarespace has provided both importing options (from most popular formats) and exporting options (to Movable Type format) since day one, but there's always been an elephant in the room that nobody discusses when it comes to portability: when you move your site, these export files don't contain your media from your old posts. In other words, in most cases you'll have to keep your old site live so that images on your new site will work. Additionally, new systems almost always have different URL structures --meaning that links to your old posts will inevitably break when you move.
These are serious problems that we set out to solve. Which is why it's with great pleasure that I can finally announce our new importing tool. The new system will:
- Support more importing types - We realize that there are a variety of blogging platforms out there, so we engineered an Importer designed to work with all the major online blogging tools including: Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type.
- Move ALL of your data over - After entering your login credentials, our Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. You will lose nothing.
- Crawl existing post media and rehost to Amazon S3 - Upon importing, Squarespace will crawl all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to our Amazon S3 account. That means you can safely cancel your old service without worrying about how to download your images and re-upload them (an impossible manual task). Further, this won't count against your Squarespace bandwidth bill at all, as this technology is on our next generation media platform that's built to scale (using S3!).
- Ensure URLs map over to Squarespace properly - For users with custom domains moving over, we actually use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts -- automatically. This ensures that when you move your domain over to us, in most cases, all links to your old posts will work, and nothing will break. Your PageRank will update seamlessly, and the move will have no impact on the SEO status you've taken so long to build.
As with all new features -- there will likely be kinks, but let us know right away and we'll get to the bottom of things. Enjoy!
Reader Comments (30)
This is brilliant! A very useful feature that i will no doubt be using very shortly.
Thank you for always keeps things going in the right direction!
-Jack
The blog importer is really nice and works perfectly. Moving in isn't a problem. But what about moving out? On your homepage you state that you can help "regardless of the direction". So is it possible to export my Squarespace blog back to Wordpress as smoothly as I am able to import it - including the transfer of all image files etc.?
I agree with Björn. Nice one, would have loved that to be there when I moved. Ah well, now the images are gone forever... but I will survive ;)
It would be nice if this would work for the way out too though. Possibly just keeping the url structure intact presuming if I move I move with my own domain. shouldn't be that hard.
Also happy to see that the iphone app is coming very soon now and praying that you will start your social integration soon so I can remove friendfeed from thylmann.net ;)
Great feature! Congrats on the pub at TechCrunch.
Dude, this is great - we'll make excellent use of this on a number of sites. Thanks.
Bjorn: We provide an XML dump which can be programmatically parsed, and a MT-compatible export file for other systems. Since other systems have no way of reading in binary data in their export files, providing a similar level of export portability is impossible -- as they would not support the equivalent import.
That said -- it is COMPLETELY possible for these systems to provide a similar level of importing/re-hosting if they wish to actually solve the problem as we have done here. Squarespace exports provide complete access to your data, should they choose to use it.
Well, it would be nice if there would be a way to download all my files at once, which I uploaded to S3/Squarespace, e.g. as a ZIP file... I could then put this via FTP on a server running Wordpress and "re-use" them for the WP blog.
That would'nt be as comfortable as your importer, but at least some kind of solution...
We don't mean binary export in the XML. But simply giving a download link to get all files that are included in the blog. I could then just upload that to the new host. Then a short search and replace for the URL of the files and your old files would be working. So just a file export would be enough.
Excellent feature ... well done. I will look forward to try it ...
Hi Anthony,
Can you do a little clarification on the following:
Ensure URLs map over to Squarespace properly - For users with custom domains moving over, we actually use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts -- automatically. This ensures that when you move your domain over to us, in most cases, all links to your old posts will work, and nothing will break. Your PageRank will update seamlessly, and the move will have no impact on the SEO status you've taken so long to build.
1. What do you mean by mapping?
2. How will the PageRank update seamlessly? Are you saying that 301 redirects are finally here? If so, you should say so! Brag about it! TypePad mentioned they were working on this almost a year ago, and... crickets. People who understand the SEO issue need to see the phrase "301 redirect" or "canonical URL" or other terminology.
3. When will this URL/PageRank preservation be available to those who are migrating non-blog sites over to Squarespace?
Hi Bonnie,
1. By mapping -- I mean if you have a post on your old site at a particular URL, it will appear at that same URL after you move over.
2. **Corrected** We auto-generate a set of 301's for you from your original URLs to your new Squarespace post URLs. I originally stated we used a more transparent mapping -- but this isn't true. Both the new clean Squarespace URLs and pointers from old URLs exist. This does imply there is an internal 301 mapping type now.
3. You can always use the mapping feature to create pages at any arbitrary URL. This feature is just an automated way to move over a TON of posts at once while keeping your URLs intact.
Make sense? Let me know if I'm missing something.
Wow, this is amazing! But...what if I imported my Blogger blog back in June? Can this help me now with all of my broken links? I went crazy trying to find a way to get this done back then, but there was no way. It would be great if I could fix the links now.
I just tested the importer from Blogger. If I attempt to edit an image in a post in the journal, I am told that it appears that the image is not hosted on SS. What to do?
I have a blog that's implemented using Drupal (http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/). There must be more than a few people in my situation who would migrate to ss if importing was easy. The features you mention here are crucial, including the URL mapping, and I use a feedburner rss feed, so losing readers *hopefully* won't be a problem. I'd really like your answer re: Drupal compatability.
matt
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Matthew Cornell | matt@matthewcornell.org | 413-626-3621 | 34 Dickinson Street, Amherst MA 01002 | matthewcornell.org
Blogs that were imported into our system before the newly refreshed importer was released will need to be re-imported to benefit from the asset relocation and URL redirection features.
At the moment, imported images cannot be edited within our editor and managed within our website manager interface. In order to edit or replace the image, you will have to upload a new image to your general storage area using the editor or the website manager interface. As we improve our integration with Amazon S3, we will find a way to make this easier for everyone.
With regards to Drupal support, we still have a lot of homework to do on their Import/Export API. There doesn't seem to be a Drupal component/plugin that uses that API to provide users with a simple way to export content out of the system. Until that happens, it would be difficult for us to make a bet on how to best integrate Drupal content. There might be a way to export Drupal content to the MovableType format. If so, you can try exporting to MovableType and then importing the content to your Squarespace site.
I hope that helps.
Thank you so much!
We have neglecting importing our old blog info into our SS site because it was too much of a pain in the #$%^. We really appreciate the new addition.
AY
Re: A. Casalena's remarks, I too imported months before this new importer update. I imported almost 1000 pages, and am very frustrated with all the broken links that used to be on my Blogspot.com site.
My question is, if there is no way to fix this, what is the next best solution? I'm told that Google will eventually scrape those dead links, but it's killing me in the meantime. It's been 3 months now, and those old links are still coming up.
I'm losing all my SEO and this is an ecommerce site on which I conduct online antiques appraisals.
When can I look forward to getting my SEO back? I was at almost 1000 hits a day on avg. and am down to about 100 now.
Also,other than re-importing, what can I do to help things along? I don't want to re-import because I"ve tweaked the posts. Can I ever look forward to getting things back to normal?
The best solution is still to re-import your old blog. Re-importing is the only way to ensure that Google properly redirects requests for your domain's old URLs to their new home on Squarespace.
An alternate approach would be to manually create URL shortcuts for your old URLs. This should take care of any broken links your users may encounter on the Internet. It's a time consuming process but it should work. URL shortcuts are available with our Pro package.
http://manual.squarespace.com/features/creating-a-url-shortcut.html
OK, thanks Paolo. I'll see if I can do it myself.
> Ensure URLs map over to Squarespace properly
This is such a great feature. Question: For historical reasons (i.e., my screwup) my blog has two different locations for posts. Older ones (~200) are under "blog/", e.g.,
http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2008/03/my-academic-productivity-post-is-up.html
Newer ones (~100) are *not* under "blog/", e.g.,
http://matthewcornell.org/2009/09/national-or-any-news-driving-you-nuts-heres-one-way-talk-yourself-down.html
Please tell me: Will the new mapping feature pick up both cases?
Thanks,
matt
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Matthew Cornell | matt@matthewcornell.org | 413-626-3621 | 34 Dickinson Street, Amherst MA 01002 | matthewcornell.org
Hey Matt,
I'm not sure what you mean by "picking up both cases" but importing your old posts under the journal module "blog" shouldn't affect your new posts located in another journal module.
I hope that helps.
This feature alone was enough to convert me from blogger, great job.
If you could consider the option to import or even create stubs for some of the more common widgets like Links, Archive, etc.
Looking forward to building a readship over here :)
Come on guys, when is the iphone app going to be available in the UK?
Elegant solutions to complex problems. You guys have done it again.
I imported my blog from Blogger to SquareSpace several months ago. Is there a way to re-import it to SS to take advantage of these new features and retain all of the hundreds of Journal entries I have created here since moving to SS?