Craig Jensen's long-running BookNotes weblog has fallen on hard times since the move from Weblogs.Com to Buzzword.Com in 2004. His site lost its Google pagerank and he's had trouble rebuilding his audience.
As the first step in retiring free Manila hosting on Buzzword.Com, I'm helping him transfer the weblog to Movable Type, because I have a five-user commercial license that's going to waste on Workbench and I'd like to encourage a fellow liberal and bibliophile to keep blogging.
Jason Levine's Frontier script converted all 3,064 BookNotes entries into Movable Type's custom import format and extracted several hundred images from the weblog's Frontier database into individual files.
When I tried to import the entries, Movable Type happily reported that "All data imported successfully!" but it wasn't true. No entries were imported, a common problem I've experienced before that comes up on the software's support forums.
The problem turned out to be a cross-platform issue with text files. Windows and Linux use different end-of-line character sequences, so the export file I created on Frontier (running on Windows) could not be imported into Movable Type (running on Linux).
On Linux, I used the text editor vi to convert the import file from Windows to Linux format with this command:
The entries imported successfully after the change.
Six Apart has the best weblog import functionality I've used, but the software shouldn't report success when an import has failed to add a single entry. If possible, the software should check for Windows end-of-line characters in an import file and either flag the error or offer to fix it.
BookNotes requires more work to finish the move, as you can see from the test site. The next step: Figuring out how to edit the weblog entries so that graphics are properly displayed.