How to Combine Two Blogs into One

Happy New Year, everyone!

Maybe 2012 can be a year of taking care of projects that have been sitting on the back burner for awhile.

One of those, for me, is straightening up my "blog" house.

In July of 2009, I started a blog project called "Going Green Jewelry". I had decided to try to use up components I already had before buying any new ones.

I had some cool info in that blog (including how to easily make a DIY photo cube for a couple bucks) and I was thinking I'd have to copy and paste that info into my regular blog (this one) in order to share with my readers.

But this morning I discovered a tool that Blogger recently finished beta-testing.

Export/Import

If you have two blogs that you want to mesh, you can export all of your postings from one of them into a holding area to be imported into your other blog.

Let's go one step at a time and you'll see how easy, fast, and workable this is.

First, go to the blog you want to take the posts FROM.

Go to the dashboard of that blog and select SETTINGS.

Right there at the top of that page, next to BLOG TOOLS, you should now see “Import Blog” – “Export Blog” – “Delete Blog”.

Click on “Export Blog”.

Click on “Download Blog”.

Select “Save File” (the default is “Open with…”.

Now go to the dashboard of the blog you want to add these posts TO.

Select SETTINGS.

This time select “Import Blog”.

Browse until you find the file that was exported (usually in the DOWNLOADS directory… named “blog-today’s date.xml”).

Enter the characters shown in the white box and click IMPORT BLOG.

Note: Do not put a check mark on “Automatically publish all imported posts” if you think you may want to go through the posts one by one to edit or ignore any.

As soon as you click IMPORT BLOG, you will get a new screen (the process is pretty fast) that will show you a listing of all the imported posts with an option to IMPORT them all if you like. I wanted all of mine imported, so I clicked on that, but you can just keep them in the listings and go through them at your leisure, adding what you want when you want and editing as you go.

BTW, this tool is also helpful if you just want a back-up of your blog. You don't necessarily have to import any blog entries. Just keep the XML file on your computer as a back-up of your entries and comments.

I still have lots of “stuff” to go through and clean up in my blog, but at least all the info is in one place now.

Talk to you later and happy blogging!