Aurlog conversion done

The conversion of this weblog to new software is, as the Emperor would say, complete. It all went rather well in the end, including the transfer of comments, which is a bonus. As a reader I really doubt if you care about any of this, but these notes may be useful to anyone wanting to do the same thing, as well to me, so nerr.

To convert from Blosxom to locally installed WordPress, I tried DeWitt Clinton’s blosxom_to_wp_import programme, but this fell down as the WordPress wiki wasn’t joking when it said it was “picky about html correctness”. I then tried one from Insanum, which worked very well aside from not recognising “../” when it looked for a file in the same directory. I got rid of that bit and it worked fine. You have to do a little bit of fiddling round to set up the template or theme, then it’s merely a matter of battling with Firefox not liking to show updated XML files for some reason. The instructions were generally very good.

Posts came across perfectly except for minor character coding issues, which I think were my fault. They were dated OK (although I’ve lost my lovely Roman dates). Comments also came across although I didn’t expect them to. They have however lost their original dates, which I can live with. I have already managed to delete the 1675 spam messages using the Comments bit on WordPress. This is a lot easier.

What hasn’t come across are the Permalinks, as on blosxom I used multilevel category paths and these were lost in the conversion. This is not exactly the most popular blog in the world so there this isn’t the end of said world. Using mod_rewrite magik (with some hints from Halvorsen), I have however managed to make sure the ten most looked-at posts from the last year or so will redirect. I have also managed to make sure that the old index.rss and index.xml feeds still work as well as the new /feed/ feed that WordPress uses. No-one read my index.atom feed, so screw that: it’s gone. Tags have also gone, but I can rebuild those, at least for the posts which deserve them.

I should also thank sil, who kindly suggested I install WordPress using Subversion, which made it a breeze and who happily answered my various idiotic questions along the way, as always.

Do feel free to help me test how comments work by writing crap in the comments to this post.