Well, that was “fun.”
You’ll see from the archives on this site that I’ve been blogging for over 10 years now, with the only real break being since last September – the reason being my old blogging system’s final mental breakdown.
Now, Gwir was a good system – a damn good system – much faster than WordPress, with a lovely Ajaxy interface so one could post and comment easily from the main page, and a Wiki-like page linkage mechanism. But the problem was interfacing it with other things: writing the code to do stuff like photoblogging, twitter integration etc. was time-consuming, and had to be re-done every time someone changed something.
And finally, last September, I ran out of time and patience. My hosting service had done things to Procmail, so my photoblogging-via-email didn’t work any more; and Twitter had switched to OAuth, which is much more secure but a complete nightmare to implement. So I stopped blogging. To be honest, I hadn’t been blogging much apart from the odd image or tweet anyway – I hadn’t really felt inclined to post much during the slow and painful decline of Broadsword Interactive.
But now, prompted by a certain Comp Sci module I’m doing in my second gasp at studenthood, I’ve gone over to WordPress. Hence the “fun.” Importing over five thousand posts from a home-brewed blogging system into WordPress is not something to be undertaken lightly, but I was damned if I was going to throw all that away.
In case you’re wondering, I used a Python script which read all the posts and comments out of the MySQL database they were stored in (well, a local copy thereof) and wrote them out as WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS,) which I then imported into the new site in chunks of 1000 posts or so.
The only really tricky part was the dire lack of WXR documentation. There were, as I predicted, a lot of test posts. But it’s done now. And I’m back.
Wotcher.