Move Complete
The move is now complete. Friday.com is being hosted by the very generous (and absolutely bloody brilliant) folks at Red-Bean. I’m now using WordPress as the publishing engine. It is an impressive piece of software in that it is extremely flexible and has a boatload of features.
It, of course, generates an RSS Feed for the site and, a very nice touch, an RSS Feed that includes all comments. This will be particularly useful in that I could never keep track of new comments being added to old posts.
WordPress also includes an XML-RPC interface that includes an implementation of the Blogger, metaWeblog, and Movable Type APIs. My only complaint is that there is no “createCategory()” method and, as such, I had to create all of the categories by hand via the [very nice] administrative interface.
Which brings me to the actual migration script. bzero — the previous weblog publishing tool that I used to render and push content to PyCS– stores all of the posts in your home directory as individual text files with a very simple (read: parseable) format.
So, I wrote a simple throwaway python script that does the following:
- read all bzero posts into Post objects
- build a hash of all categories
- filter all categories, using a hash at the beginning of the script to map between the mish-mosh of categories I had into a more reasonable (though still large) set
- verify that all categories exist on the server. Dump any that do not and exit. Continue if all exist.
- look at the content of all posts and find any that have URLs that referred to the old weblog. If the URL was to a static resource, verify that it is in the expected spot on the new weblog (well, really, that it exists in the content copied to the correct spot on the new weblog. This deck has no railings.). If the URL was to another post, rewrite it to point to the same date in the new weblog’s archive. Close enough.
- For each post, create a new post on the new site to contain that posts’s content (which may have been rewritten). Once successfully created, assign the original categories to the post.
Of the 250 or so posts that were moved across, the script fails to rewrite only one post.
Once the content was moved over, then became the ever so tedious step of adjusting the fricking template to look-n-feel remotely like something I wanted. Since I do not have the patience to deal with CSS, I chose a random template out of about 100 that I reviewed that was close to what I wanted and adjusted it. You can grab the template, if you want (why would you? I have no idea. It isn’t very good, but it works for me.
Finally, I installed a redirect at the old weblog that will land people here. I would do the same for the rss feed, but bzero insists on always pushing a re-rendered feed.
Unfortunately, comments didn’t survive the move. That is unfortunate. Even more unfortunate, the old comments on my weblog were rife with spammers. Bastards.