I have been asked this questions several times so I hope this helps!

Importing from an RSS feed
2.0.x
2.0 introduced this as an option in the Admin menu under “Import”.

First, save the RSS feed you wish to import someplace on your local machine. This would be the source and would come from the site that has the content you wish to import into your WP blog. A simple way to get the feed into a text file is to find the RSS link for that site, click it and view it in your browser, then copy/paste that to a text file. Or, of course, use your preferred tools.

Click the “Browse” button and navigate to the file containing the feed you wish to import and click “Import” to let it run.

Note: Depending on the feed and format, you may not get the entire thing loaded on the first attempt. One option is to determine how much got imported (Manage -> Posts) and remove those sections from your saved RSS file and then re-import. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

Note that newlines will be converted to
. Therefore be sure there is no newlines between any

..

s.

Pre 2.x
WordPress also has a generic RSS importer, which you can find in your WordPress source at wp-admin/import-rss.php. If your current blogging system can export in a valid RSS format, you can import that into WordPress.

Importing the RSS data is done by running the import-rss.php script from the server. For security reasons you have to edit the script to point to the file where the RSS data is stored.

If you have your blog at http://example.com, you can place your file, for example oldblog.xml, in the wp-admin directory on your site.

Edit import-rss.php by changing the value of RSSFILE in the beginning of the script. After you have changed this, run the script by accessing the script with your browser, in this case you’ll go to http://example.com/wp-admin/import-rss.php.

If the script finds your file, a link marked Begin RSS Import occur, and by pressing this link the import will start.

The RSS data are now imported, and you can remove the RSS file and restore the script.

Importing from HTML
Using trial and error one can make an e.g., perl script to concatenate HTML files as RSS s, saving into a single file.xml, then import that as RSS. Note however to first remove any newlines between

..

s, as mentioned above.

The format allowed is quite simple in fact. Just make each HTML file into an as below and concatenate them together:

Wed, 30 Jan 2009 12:00:00 +0000 Kites
Taiwan
Fun times

What great times we had…

And then Bob…

…
Just be sure the line is a single long line with no newlines embedded.

If your HTML is well-formed, you can try using the Import HTML plugin.

Google Blog Converters
In case the above methods don’t work, you can try Google Blog Converters.

This tool can convert Blogger export into WordPress format. It also supports conversion from Movable Type & LiveJournal to Blogger format. You can take the Blogger format then convert it again into WordPress format.

For more information or if you have any comments about how to import or export of RSS feeds please feel free to contact us at www.spiderchoice.com

Spider Choice Inc.
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