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AOL Journals Shutting Down Oct. 31, 2008

On Sept 30, 2008, Kelly Wilson of AOL announced to AOL Journals Users - United States
We're sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Journals will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.


Blogger has now created an automated tool for importing from AOL Journals to Blogger. The tool, described in Blogger Help: Importing your blog from AOL Journals to Blogger, sounds fairly intuitive and linear. To help with any possible problems, they have also created a Google Group: Blogger-Help-AOL Import.

A bit of bother will be experienced by those with private journals. You'll have to make the journal public, before you can start the migration. And as AOL Journals works right now, taking a journal from private to public will cause deletion of comments made while it was private. This is a matter that bears correction.

Note: Do you already have a Blogger blog? If you do, just transfer your Journal and make a new blog, then merge the two blogs - either dynamically (blog feeds, iframes, and / or links) or statically (export - import). Right now, the Export - Import wizard is available in Draft (Blue) Blogger only.

But take it easy, and chill just a little. You have until 10/31 (at the earliest). The AOL Journal Transfer utility was just released 10/8. There will be bugs, so give Blogger a chance. They don't work overnight (at least I don't think so).

(Update 10/9): Blogger Support requests that we include the AOL Journal and BlogSpot blog URLs, when reporting any failure of the blog import process.

Further advice is provided about alternative solutions
You certainly may choose to migrate to another blogging service. Since Journals has no built-in exporting function, you'll need to find a blogging service that has the ability to import from AOL Journals.


For right now, it looks like Blogger has thought this one out fairly well.

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