Migrated to Movable Type

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Well, I'm happy to be able to say that I've migrated this blog from the free Blogger hosting service over to Movable Type running on a VPS of mine successfully. MT is fairly easy to setup and run, and from the time I decided that I was going to migrate to writing this was just about 5-6 hours, most of it battling with the Blogger export and making Movable Type import it successfully.
A Brief Timeline of Blogging Engines

Image by whiteafrican via Flickr


I wouldn't have been able to do it without the incredibly helpful tutorial of the community contributed Blogger to Movable Type tutorial. To save you from watching the whole thing, the gist of it is that you need to set up Blogger to publish to an SFTP server, change the format options and templates around (there's a special template that you have to apply in order to get the entries in the format that MT wants them).

For some reason, the Blogger exports were in DOS text format rather than UNIX that was giving the MT import process fits (the symptom was simple - it would find no entries whatsoever in the file, even though they looked to be there and in the right format). Vim highlighted that for me, and made it really easy to use some simple sed-fu on the file in order to make it behave right.

Then I had (and still to some minor extent have) some CSS problems with the template, but I'm not a CSS expert (or heck even a novice) so Mo Duffy helped me through the part that was making the blog look like absolute trash :)

Some of the imported content doesn't look the best that it possibly could, but there's no way I'm going back and correcting 167 entries :)  Also, the comments didn't come over, but I'm gonna leave the old Blogger site up, so there's nothing to worry about your comments being lost and gone forever :)
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