Moving from Manila to Movable Type

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:

vi +"argdo set ff=unix" +wqa mt.txt

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.

Linux · Manila · Movable Type · 2006/03/29 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Yeah, but I should probably do the right thing with line endings in my script, offering the choice of which the user wants. I'll look into that.

As for the display of the graphic images, it looks like they're doing just fine:

booknotes.cadenhead.org

I assume you used the newSiteUrl parameter correctly, which will rewrite the image tags to point to the correct location on the new site...

Glad the script worked for you!

#1 · Jason · 2006/03/29

Cool. I thought pictures weren't working because some have numeric URLs only.

#2 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2006/03/29

In the Windows world, Notepad2 (a free replacement for Notepad with greatly advanced capabilities) has the ability to search and replace Windows, Unix and Mac newlines. I install it on all my Windows machines. It's great for coding, too.

www.flos-freeware.ch

#3 · Don McArthur · 2006/03/29

I exported my buzzword.com site using Jason's script on Windows, and imported it using Wordpress on Linux, without thinking about this issue: FTP converts EOL if you use it in ASCII mode.

#4 · David Golding · 2006/03/29

Why not use the unix2dos and dos2unix commands?

#5 · visitor · 2006/03/31

I didn't know they existed until 2:49 p.m. today. Cool.

#6 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2006/03/31

Looks good so far.

#7 · Eric Hancock · 2006/04/01

Thanks for the heads-up... I'll try to see why MT's falsely reporting success. Let me know if there's anything else we can do to help.

#8 · Anil · 2006/04/03

tancks
this post very very helped me !

Good Time

#9 · sooran · 2009/09/15