I go up for tenure next year, and am in the midst of putting my file together. I’m including my posts from this site in my file, because while this site isn’t fabulously successful by the standards of the internets, it does serve as public outreach and as a space for research ruminations for me. As far as I’m concerned, those two aspects qualify it for tenure consideration. As a vestige of the past, this tenure file has to be all paper (which will then be photocopied and sent out to external reviewers– what year is this?). I’m killing lots of trees, and I needed to produce attractive paper copies of all of my posts. Enter the wordpress plugin Anthologize, which I’ve mentioned in this space before.
When I started parezcoydigo in 2008, I had very little experience with websites– having transitioned from 1. a little unix account provided by the university; to 2. an iWeb site through my .mac account. I wasn’t prepared to pay for web hosting or to manage a wordpress.org install, so I went with the service you see before you. WordPress.com doesn’t allow for user plugins for a whole host of good security and performance reasons. Nor should they. But, now I want to anthologize all these posts. What to do?
The solution is simply to install wordpress.org locally on one’s machine, export your wordpress.com site, import to the new local site, and produce the anthology there. And here’s how to do that on a mac.
1. Make a directory somewhere for your new wordpress install. I like to use a root directory called sites.
2. Install MAMP on your mac. MAMP is an off-the-shelf apache/mysql/php stack used for local development. Of course, if you know what anthologize is you probably already know this. If not, simply download the .dmg and follow the instructions.
3. Once MAMP starts, it’ll open a page in your browser with information on mysql user/password, hostname, and port. You’ll need that in a minute or two. MAMP will also open a new window with green or red lights that show if Apache and mysql are running. Click on the preferences tab on that window:
Click on the apache tab at the top of the preferences, and enter the /path/to/your/site_folder:
Click OK. Now you need to create a new mysql database. From the MAMP start page, click on the PHPMyAdmin link at the top of the page. Use the resulting form to create a new database, and remember its name.
You’re done with MAMP for now.
4. Install wordpress into your sites folder. First thing, create a new folder for the install in your sites folder. Call it whatever you’d like– say blog. You need all your wordpress files in this new folder. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can download the zip file from wordpress and unzip it in the sites folder. Or, checkout the code from svn. To do the latter, open a terminal window, change directory to your sites/blog/ directory and enter this command:
svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk .
The trailing . needs to be included.
5. Configure wordpress. Open your new wordpress install in your browser, which in our example would be at: http://localhost/blog/. You will be prompted to configure the installation– click to follow that link. Fill out the form with your mysql database name and the root user and password provided by MAMP on its start page, and finish the wordpress installation with a new username and password for you site (not the same as the mysql info).
6. Now that you have a fresh new copy of wordpress installed, go to the Dashboard, choose to install new plugins. You need two plugins to make this work: Anthologize and WordPress Importer. Install and activate them.
7. Surf back over to your wordpress.com site. Under the Tools menu, chose Export. Select the export filters for the posts that you want to use for your anthology, and then click export. Note where the file is saved. It’s a special wordpress XML file that contains all the info you need to move your site.
8. Back to your localhost site. Now, chose Import from the Tools menu. On the import page, choose the XML file you downloaded from your other site. I found it useful to create a User under the name I wanted to appear on the exported Anthologize-generated file. If you do that, select that user’s name as the name to attribute all the imported posts to:
On the next page, make sure to check the box to import all of the attachments and files associated with your site:
Now, your wordpress.com site has been completely imported, and you’re free to start anthologizing away with the Anthologize plugin.
For my tenure file, I decided to produce separate PDFs for each year of blogging I’ve done, and also a special selected posts PDF too. Here’s a sample.
Associate Professor of Early Latin America Department of History University of Tennessee-Knoxville
parezco y digo 
Hi Chad,
So good to hear that you got Anthologize to work for you. These are great step-by-step instructions. Would you mind if we feature your case study on the anthologize website?
Best,
Effie
Hi Effie– please feel free to use this as a case study. And thanks to the One Week crew for the great tool.
What a great idea – I wanted to do something with student posts to a class blog hosted on WPcom and this is the way to get there. Thanks – this is very useful.