How to export your VOX Blog into WordPress

VOX is a great free blogging platform but they do try their darnedest to keep you blogging on their site by making it difficult to transfer your content. Yesterday while searching for a way to export my VOX blog into WordPress I stumbled across the wide world of RSS feeds. It’s a wonderful messy world – I even got distracted and found myself setting up a feedburner account, er...more on that in another post.

After much further research, I found the easiest way to bring my blog over since I didn’t have an IT degree was to find a full text RSS feed of my VOX blog. Once this RSS 2.0 or xml file was saved onto my local drive I could then import it into my WordPress blog. Great!

In case you would like to find your own VOX full text RSS feed try this URL -

http://[yourblognamehere].vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml

Mine was

http://klutterpillar.vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml

So let’s do this together in steps

Step 1

Open your full text RSS in a web browser. I did mine in Firefox.

http://[yourblogtitlehere].vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml

Step 2

View page source.

There are various ways to view page source I will list 3 here-

Left click the [view] tab on the browser and left click [page source]

If you are using Firefox try holding down this shortcut [CRTL+U]. This should open the source page.

Right click on some of the blog text in the RSS feed on the open browser page. Now left click [View Page Source].

Step 3

In the new window that has opened up – window title should read “Source of: http: http://[yourblogtitlehere].vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml - Mozilla Firefox”, select [File] and follow by selecting [Save Page As].

Save this file to your local drive making sure that you keep the .xml file type.

Step 4

Important - Make sure your default post category is correct. I ended up having all my imported posts go into the wrong category and then spent an hour editing them into their rightful categories. Avoid my mistake by changing your default post category before you make the import.

This can be found in your WordPress admin under Settings > Writing > Default Post Category

Step 5 Importing VOX blog posts into WordPress

In the WordPress admin panel select [Manage]; now select the [Import] option.

You will now be presented with a variety of importing options, select [RSS].

Use the [Browse] button to find the .xml file you just saved. WordPress will now upload your last 10 published VOX posts.

Note -

WordPress will only import 10 blog posts from the VOX RSS feed at a time with this method. You may have to delete or make private the blogs you have previously imported in order to import the next 10 entries.