I received an email from Wordpress.com support that the importer was now working. With trepidation I went to manage, import, blogger. I clicked authorize and voila! I came to the screen where you select which blogger blog you want to import. Wow - this is further than I got yesterday. But, alas, the importer at my self hosted WordPress blog was still not working. So I decided to do the three step workaround that I mentioned yesterday. (New Blogger to wordpress.com blog to self hosted wordpress blog) .

Back at my wordpress.com account I clicked import and the process could not have been easier.

There was one minor glitch where the importer got stuck importing the comments. I stopped the import by clicking on manage posts. I found the last comment that was imported. Then I went to my Blogger blog and deleted the very next comment (thinking that this was probably the one that the importer got stuck on.). I then went back to the import blogger screen in wordpress.com and clicked on the continue option that was offered. The import completed without a problem.

My final step was to export from wordpress.com to an xml file that I saved to my desktop. Then I went to my self hosted wordpress blog and chose the import Wordpress option (it says import from a WordPress export file). Within minutes my entire Blogger blog was on my self hosted Wordpress blog, images and all.

Overall, if the importer had been working yesterday, importing from new blogger to Wordpress was a relatively painless process. But one thing that I have learned about technology, never expect it to work on the first try.