Following Micro.blog’s pricing changes, rather than retiring an old blog hosted with a basic account, I decided to upgrade my main account to premium and migrate the old blog to the premium account. I get to access the advanced features of Micro.blog and the Micro.blog team doesn’t lose any recurring revenue, win-win!

Here’s the process I went through:

1. Logged into Micro.blog for Mac with the old account:
   1. Export an archive of the blog - File → Export → Blog Archive
   2. Renamed the archive from Micro.blog.bar to Micro.blog.zip and expanded it to check the contents… the only thing I could see that was missing was the Pages
   3. Manually copied the text from our 2 custom Pages in Micro.Blog for Mac to a text file (ignored /archive and /photos)
   4. Signed out of (“removed”) the old account from Micro.blog for Mac
2. Signed in to my old account on the web:
   1. Deleted the blog
   2. Changed the username on the old account (I don’t think this was necessary… later I changed it back)
   3. Reset my Fediverse/Mastodon name
   4. Downloaded a copy of my invoices
   5. Canceled my old subscription
3. Logged in to my main account on the web:
   1. Upgraded to premium
   2. Added a new blog (same domain as the old one)
   3. Added the two pages (only one visible in nav)
   4. Deleted unwanted pages
4. Relaunched Micro.blog for Mac
   1. Confirmed the new (old 😉) blog was available on the main account
   2. Imported the posts and images File → Import → Blog Archive

The whole process took less than an hour (including writing this post). The slowest part was the blog import which took about 13 minutes to import 52 posts and 104 images (on a 280/20Mbps wifi connection… would have been 1/1Gbps if I’d plugged into Ethernet 🤦‍♂️).

My only other regret is that I didn’t think to make note of the “Design” section of the old blog… the new version looks very different and I can’t remember what theme I chose or customisations I made.

Overall, the whole process went shockingly smoothly and my only (very mild) complaint is that the Blog Archive format (or some suitable alternative) doesn’t include the pages or design info. Not being able to export and import pages might have been a bigger complaint from me if I’d had more than 2 pages to copy (or if I’d forgotten to make a manual copy before deleting the blog).

Once again I’m impressed with just how well designed and executed Micro.blog is despite being bootstrapped and being developed and supported by a very small team!