Wednesday, July 31, 2002

I know next to nothing about programming languages for Unix. I can (and probably will) learn them, but not in the timeframe I'm looking for. I've already discovered, through Step One, that MovableType has a nifty little import feature. All you need to do is format the output of your blog into a predefined format, collected in a single .txt file.

I had help with this already, but it didn't quite get me where I wanted to go. No titles. Posts I'd sent via e-mail have all kinds of goofy formatting and lost links and whatnot I also know that Radio creates local XML files for each post in my weblog. They are all in a single directory, and look something like this.

So I need to clean up formatting and include the link titles. I don't know PHP or Perl or Python, but I do know vbscript and HTML pretty well. I'm too tired to build this now, but the strategy is this:

  1. Spin through my archives directory, building a three-dimensional array (title, text, date) for each post, cleaning up the text entries as we go.
  2. After all files have been added to the array, build a text file using the MT-specified format.
  3. FTP said file to my server.
  4. Cross my fingers.
  5. Import the file into a new blog, noting URl to the permalink for the first entry ID
  6. Back in Windows, run another script, whereby each of the existing pages in my weblog are replaced with a response.redirect to the new location
  7. Manually copy all of my stories and images to identical directories on the new server.
  8. Find and replace all link references to "radio.weblogs.com/0101146/" with the new URL.

Should be pretty solid. Hope I can get to it by the weekend.
6:52:36 PM    


Here's the deal: I'm definitely going to migrate this site to MovableType. I'll document the process later, I promise, but here's the first test (let's call it half an hour of effort). Please note that this is not the final destination.

In doing this, I think I have some better ideas on migration that won't fudge the links, or lose my titles. After that, I'll see if I can get comments, too.
12:27:31 AM    



© Copyright 2002 Robert K. Brown .
Last update: 8/17/2002; 5:07:10 PM .

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