You may have noticed that there is now a large amount of posts that have been added. That’s because I finally ported over my Blogger posts.

First thing I had to do was export the Blogger archives. Using their FTP publishing technique proved extremely difficult as it constantly had something to complain about. That reminds me, I need to uninstall pure-ftpd and ncftp. So then I stumbled across this wonderful gem. I followed the instructions on how to modify the template and everything worked out perfectly. I downloaded the archives (as you can as well) to my SMB server path and I was ready to begin the import.

Two problems arose, one only after the import. First, I noticed that the default category is used, which is “Other.” This won’t fly because I want to have a category hierarchy for any and all blog imports / exports. As you can see from this post’s categories, I wanted the category ‘anti-thought’ (which is a child of ‘Blog Import’) to be assigned to each imported entry. This was a simple change, an entry needed to be made into wp_post2cat linking the post_id to the category_id.

The other problem was that I realized that my blog used to not have titles for entries. I started using Blogger.com way back in ‘03 just after Blogger.com was purchased by google (they seem to have a hand in everything these days). So all of my posts from 2003, generally speaking, lack titles and therefore make it difficult for the end user to get to the permalink via the post title. I haven’t decided how I will handle this yet, but my guess is that I should snag X many characters from the front of the post and use that as the title.

I will be submitting a patch to Skeltoac as soon as he moderates my comment and sends me an email. If anyone has any other ideas on this whole import thing, do share. If anyone has a blog that they would like ported and hosted here, just send me an email.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there’s a great visual walk-though of this whole import process located here.