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February 12, 2005

exodus ain't easy

First off, let me just say that installing Movable Type was easy. Just absolutely a snap. And they have some pretty good documentation too. I found plenty of help in their help files.

But there were two major hurtles I could see as I started puttering around with it last evening. First, I'd need a better set of templates than the defaults. I just can't abide default templates. No way, not good enough for me. So I googled around for some alternates while working on the second problem (which I'll get to in a moment) but didn't find much of anything. And this is odd, since I seem to recall finding a whole trove of 'em dangling online a few weeks ago when I went lookin'. At the time of this writing, this website is sortofa slate blue and white, and covered with fine print which, on closer examination, turns out to be this very post you're readin' right now. But I'll sort that out soon enough as you'll soon have seen. On to the second problem, which, due to it's tremendous difficility, plumb nigh broke mah spirt.

The problem, yall, was yall. Or more accurately the noisier ones of you. Movable Type's instructions for importing my blogger.com blog more or less advised me to put my friends' comments into a dinghy and set 'em adrift. But I couldn't do it. So I set to work.

Noticing that MT had instructions on how to export GrayMatter comments, I tried creating a blogger.com template that would mimic the GrayMatter format. No. So then I went further in my reverse-engineeringist ways, and exported a couple of test posts out of MovableType. I could re-import those just fine, but when I tried to mimic that format with the blogger stuff, MT found no reason to import anything. I had gone so far as to export my stuff out of blogger.com as xml, and was starting write a program to directly insert the xml'd entries and comments into MT's database, when I thought I'd give the ole reverse engineered blogger export one more crack.

Several years hours later I found and fixed my problem. Movable Type is configured to read documents have a simple newline character (ascii character 10) at the end of each line. Blogger.com apparently thought it was a lark to stick an ascii character 13 right before the ascii character 10. Don't you hate it when that happens?

And there you have it. Or more accurately, there I have you, or at least your comments. Hail the gang is definitely all here. And I can say with certainty, now that it's all over, that I would never have migrated to Movable Type if it had meant losing all your comments. No way in slate-blue heck.

For those who are either technically inclined, or, perhaps more pertinently, blogger.com-ally disinclined, I am including here, for your enjoyment and edification, the stuff I created and used to get blogger to let my peeps go:

• Blogger template for exporting as xml (with comments :):

  blogger_to_xml.txt

  
  

• Blogger template for exporting to MovableType's import/export format:

  blogger_to_mt.txt

  
  

• Perl script I wrote to cleanup blogger's author field/link and also clean up line ending characters so I could import my peeps' comments and get some sleep this night:

  fixBloggerJunk

  
  

• Me. If you're a friend of mine, and are wisely trying to get free from ole bloggy, and need help with any of the above elements, I'd be happy to stand around and yell encouragement and advice. Heck I might even roll up my sleeves...

  The Old Me
  

Posted by joel at February 12, 2005 09:40 PM

Comments

Posted by: Diva at February 13, 2005 05:05 PM

Posted by: k_sra at February 13, 2005 08:27 PM

Posted by: Honest + Popular at February 14, 2005 12:35 PM

Posted by: Wheelson at February 26, 2005 07:48 PM

Posted by: joel at February 26, 2005 07:55 PM

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