The move seems to have mostly smoothly. Importing Blogger entries was not difficult. It helped that I used the bold tags for the post titles, otherwise editing the titles would have been a pain. I am working on categorizing the entries from Blogger, but right now most of them are classified under the category “Blogger”.
One thing about the import process that bugs me is that the MT entries are numbered in the wrong order (1 for the most recent Blogger post, increasing reverse chronologically). I guess I could fix it by getting Blogger to generate the blog in chronological order, but I’ll let it be.
Importing comments from Haloscan would be a huge hassle, so I’ll take it slow. If there is a faster way than basically re-entering all the comments manually, please let me know.
My email address has also changed. The new address is listed in the sidebar. Please do not use the old Hotmail address any more since the signal to noise ratio there is pretty bad.
Hey, nice digs. Wow, I get to make the first comment! Who’d you get to host the site?
Bin Gregory: Thanks. I got the $10/month hosting plan with Dreamhost. Along with the domain registration, it gives me 200MB of web space and 20GB/month bandwidth.
The new site looks really great!
Regarding the order of the ID numbers, yeah I noticed that too after I imported, but you can sort the posts by date. I hardly pay any attention to the entry ID numbers.
Very nice. I did the same move (same hosting, even) a few months ago, so if you have any questions, I might be able to help you. Probably I’ll just stare blankly for a while and then mutter something completely unhelpful, but stranger things have happened.
Thanks.
Andrew: I might take you up on your offer. Let’s forget the “might” part! So here’s my question: Did you import your old comments? If you did, what commenting system were you using and how did you do it?
Importing comments, as I remember, is done in the same way as importing entries – you make everything into one huge text file, with the appropriate format, and the MT “import” function will eat it up and spit everything into the right place. I used YACCS comments before I got MT, and YACCS lets you dump all your comments into a “XML” file, which I think is just a text file. Then I used a utility I found on the MT help boards, which (as I remember) just re-formatted this enormous text file, and then had MT import it. It didn’t work 100% – there were some hiccups, and I lost some comments – but I’d say I got 80% of them, and it wasn’t all that painful.
So here’s my advice:
1. Go to the MT message boards (on the MT website) and see if anyone’s had this problem before. There are thousands, maybe 10’s of thousands, of people who use MT, and so pretty much any question you can think of to ask has already been asked, and, if an answer exists, answered. So see what they say.
2. Try to get some kind of text file dump of you comments from your comment service. YACCS let you do this by pushing a button, but your mileage may vary. If you can’t get this, I think you’re stuck.
3. You’ll almost certainly have to re-format this file. The MT online manual explains the format that MT needs in order to import them correctly. You can either write a script to do it, which may or may not be worthwhile depending on how many comments you have, or do it by hand. I suspect that if you can get the text file dump of your comments, then someone has already written a script to do the conversion.
4. If you are importing, and you run into a problem part-way through, DON’T RE-IMPORT THE WHOLE FILE AGAIN. If you do, you’ll duplicate all the comments you successfully imported the first time. Cut out everything from the text file that was imported successfully, and either fix or remove whatever the problem is, and then import the edited text file. It can be very painful to import a few hundred comments, but it’s even worse to have to cut them out by hand.
Hope that helps. Remember, when in doubt, the MT boards and manual are your best resource. They’ve done a very good job with both.
And therein lies the rub. Haloscan doesn’t allow any export right now. They say they might implement it in a month or so. I have decided to wait for that.