As per Gerry’s question, I emailed the WordPress tech support with this inquiry this morning:
Dear Tech Guys:
I’m being evangelical about WordPress and trying to get my friends to ditch Blogger and move to this service. The question I have is this: Can folks who have been forced to switch to Blogger Beta transfer their blog archives to WordPress? I know this was an issue before, but I don’t know if it’s still one now.
Thanks!
-Chili
This is the answer I got from Mark – and less than two hours later on a Sunday, no less…
Hi,
Our importer now transfers New Blogger blogs.
And yes – bring them over 
-
Mark
There you have it. You have no excuse. Make faces at Blogger as you open your new WordPress accounts…
I wonder if this is part of Blogger’s evil plan to get rid of us all and then close the service. I think Google inherited it and is now sorry and doesn’t want to be bothered to keep it running.
i’m running out of excuses…
When I switched from Blogger to WordPress, there was not yet a way to transfer my archives – I had switched to the beta version – so I had to leave the archive up at the old site. About a month ago, WordPress announced they now had the means to transfer EASILY (!!!) and I did. AM so happy. Tra la.
Sorry, honey. I’ve got my school blogs all up and running on Blogger, and no real reason to switch at this point (I even got rid of the anti-spam code to make it easier for you). Maybe during the summer, when I have time, I’ll investigate moving, but for the time being my “ole time religion” of Blogger will remain.
I will take a copy of The Watchtower, though. Do they still charge for that?
::smiles mischievously::
They do NOT charge for the Watchtower anymore. As a matter of fact they stand on the street and fairly shove them at you where I am. Thankfully I don’t live in a place where they can get to my doorbell anymore.
I moved Verb-Ops on up to the East Side, to that D-Lux apartment in the sky. I need to keep the chocolate milk thing going to keep my introverted links proper, however.
Meno, I am convinced, is correct.
I would like to switch from blogger to wordpress because blogger is a cranky bitch and isn’t letting me leave comments, which makes me paranoid about the things that people want to, but are unable, to say to me. But I don’t even know where or how to begin. First, do I have to host the blog myself, or can wordpress do that for me? I do have a lot of hosting space on a friend’s server, but I have been working semi-hard to preserve layers of anonymity — I started Tatterdemallion because I didn’t want to write for my friends — so I would rather not use her hosting. Soooo. Will wordpress host the blog?
I’ll check back here, but maybe you can email me the answer, if you know it or could ask.
Feather, since I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “hosting,” I’m going to say that WordPress does it for you. Go to WordPress-dot-com and get yourself started; it’s so easy, even *I* could do it (and that’s sayin’ somethin’)