Tuesday, July 1, 2003

Bill Kearney
Moving from Radio to Movable Type
Bill is an outspoken detractor of Dave Winer's and thus has a vested interest in facilitating people migrating.
Exporter tool for Radio
So far, the latest version of the Exporter tool is causing my instsanceof Radio to choke and crash. Bill doesn't really support Mac users, but he's looking into it for me.

UPDATE: Bill figured out what the problem was (improper encoding of he download that was confusing my web browser) and ultimately Exporter worked like a charm!

Tony Bowden: Understanding Nothing
Importing Radio Posts to MT
Tony Bowden offers an alternate approach, with a macro that should show all your posts on one page. So far I'm getting "[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "showAll" hasn't been defined.]" even though I've put the file called showAll.txt containing his script in my /Macros/ folder.

Eric's Weblog
Emergency site replacement
December 15, 2002
Another discussion of migrating from Radio to MT

Theoblogical
Misses title-link shortcuts and wants to know how to migrate stories.

matt.griffith
Migrating to Movable Type
October 03, 2002
Documents his own d.i.y. process: "Overall the entire process sucked."

David Watson
June, 2002

It strikes me that content management software, particularly in the weblog space, is a lot like old mainframe stuff. How? Well, one of the reasons that big iron has stayed big for so long is that it's really difficult to migrate out of 30 years of proprietary vertical market software. I've now got that problem with only a few months of experience with a content management system (CMS). I, of all people, should be well-aware of the problem since I worked on CMS stuff a few years ago but I'm probably asleep at the wheel. One thing that is clearly needed is something along the lines of RSS that would act as a glue format between content management systems so that migrating from one to the other wasn't so damn hard. I'm not sure if anybody's thinking about or working on this, but it's clearly going to be an increasingly large problem moving forward since the content just keeps growing.

Besides the above, Google directed me to some of my own posts, less than useful in this circumstance, and to this one:

Migrating from MT to Drupal
initial link to it (via fuzzyblog) broken... found searching root site for 'migrate' - hate the nodes!

categories: radioactive movablefeats

2:05:03 PM    say what []

My personal view of blog tool migration is that each vendor should make it exceedingly easy to import blog entries from any other tool, probably using some dialect of XML. I think it's probably too much to expect for the vendors to bend over backwards to make you leave, but since most tools produce XML-based feeds and some even store, archive, or backup their database contents in XML formats, just having good importing should do the trick most of the time.

My most immediate plans are to move several of my Blogger blogs to Movable Type and to move Radio Free Blogistan from Radio to MT. Blogger to MT isn't so tricky, though I will document that process. I also plan to convert my old personal journal/diary/blog sites from their engines (hand-rolled, diaryland, Blogger, and LiveJournal) and import them into my X-POLLEN blog.

The motivation of taking Bite Media and Uncle John's Blog off of Blogger is mainly to get basic features like comments and categories enabled. I like the new "Dano" Blogger interface and I'm a paid Blogger Pro user, plus I write and speak about weblogs in my work, so I will continue using Blogger for some purposes. One possible idea is to run a simple link list through Blogger and include it as a sidebar in my other blogs.

The motivation for moving RFB from Radio to MT is more complex. The primary impetus is Trackback. I use the Blogistan site primarily to discuss the weblog phenomenon, and most of the thought leaders in that space use TB to coordinate their conversations. TB has already been demoed for Manila and is coming to Radio as soon as Userland's priorities allow, but I'm impatient, especially as the not-Echo discussion rages and I feel less than a full participant in the conversation.

I will also continue to use Radio, mainly because I like the news aggregator and I use it to automatically assemble all my other blog posts into one place (currently the x-syndicate category here). The main thing I don't like (and don't understand) about the multiauthor weblog tool is the way it changes folds incoming post titles into the body of reposted entries. If I knew how to fix that, I would.

I also like being part of this Salon blog community, such as it is, and using Radio is kind of a prerequisite, at least for the stats side of things. So, I'll be renaming my Salon Radio weblog with usernum 1111 to something besides RFB, once I've migrated the RFB contents to MT. I may use Salonika, or x-syndicate, or something else entirely, and I'll probably rarely or never post to it directly but continue using it as a compendium site. What's interesting is that people linking to the old address blogs.salon.com/0001111/ will end up at the new site and people linking to radiofreeblogistan.com will still end up going to RFB, despite its different backend.

So, this is going to be complicated. Broadly, there are three major steps:

1. Set up a new RFB blog in Movable Type, pointed at a staging area.
2. Adapt the current RFB design to MT's templates.
3. Convert the 2000 or so posts here to MT import format.
4. Import the old entries into MT.
5. Publish the new MT RFB blog to the rfb.com domain.
6. Rename my Radio blog and redirect its output elsewhere.
7. Delete the old Radio entries once they are safely and properly working in the new blog.

I think that's about it. So far all I've done is (1). Converting the templates shouldn't be too hard, even though there are conceptual differences. Radio breaks out the day and item as separate templates but uses the same home template for the home page and for archive pages. MT nests the day and item sections in one main index template but uses different templates for various archive views.

Once I've got the new templates set up (and I still would like to improve the design, but one thing at a time!), I'll post a dummy entry there just to test it and to demonstrate that that step is completed. I plan to document all my procedures and note the gotchas when possible.

The big problem is converting the backed up entries to the MT format without breaking permalinks. Also, Radio stores each day as YYYY/MM/DD.html whereas MT by default puts each entry on its own archive page, with my preferred URL being YYYY/MM/DD/entry_title.html. In order not to break old links to the site, I'll probably end up keeping a duplicate set of all past entries. That may be confusing to some, but it should minimize breakage.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Migrate from Radio Userland to Movable Type page offers a Python script for accomplishing the conversion from Radio's XML backup files. It looks very cool. I'm still figuring out how to run Python on my Mac (OS X 10.2.6), but if I can wrap my head around that, it may solve most of my problems when I get to step 3.

As I said, though, I'm impatient, and there's a chance I may do a more crude migration in the short run, which would involve just starting to post using MT and stopping using Radio. The problem is that MT's search wouldn't know about the old Radio posts, but then I could continue using the Google search aimed at my radiofreeblogistan.com and that should work just fine. It's by far less elegant to leave the entires unconsolidated in two separate data piles, but in the end I'll do what works, even if that means taking a sloppy path of least resistance.

The Blogger-related migrations are easier, as I said, so I may just slip them in along the way, when I get the time.

I'm still interested in other tools, especially those used for multiple-user sites, such as pMachine and Drupal, so I doubt my consolidation will last.

I'm also trying to get a wiki set up at thedeadbeat.com. I downloaded phpWiki, but I'm running into problems mainly related to my own stupidity and ignorance.

Updates as they come.

categories: bloggerz salonika metablog radioactive movablefeats

11:28:26 AM    say what []