MT Migration - The Final Chapter
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Monday, June 23, 2003 at 09:24 PM [GMT-6]

This has been one of the longer days of my relatively brief blogging career, as I've worked literally all day to get the Gazette into some sort of presentable form. I've made some really dumb mistakes along the way — thereby increasing my workload significantly — but I've also delved into some cool things that I wouldn't otherwise have explored. I think that the good has outweighed the bad, so I consider the overall process to be a success.

My biggest headache was in getting my Blogger archives (what there was of them) imported into Movable Type. The process itself was really very straightforward; MT's documentation is clear and easy to follow. My downfall was my lack of understanding about how MT formats and integrates those archives into its system.

For example, I never paid much attention to providing a title for my Blogger posts. Blogger doesn't place much value on a post title. In the MT scheme, however, a title is very useful and widely used (for example, the links between individual archived posts are the posts' titles). So when I imported the Blogger archives, they came across without titles, and MT's default handling is to take the first 15 characters of the post as a title. That led to some pretty weird — even useless — titles.

Also, because I didn't plan sufficiently well, some of my MT directories ended up being in different places than their Blogger counterparts, meaning that most of my image links were hosed.

Had I just stopped and dealt with those two issues in a rational manner, I would have escaped somewhat unscathed from the Great Archive Import Fiasco. However, using as my motto the old oilfield advice — get a bigger hammer — I decided that I would just delete all the archive-related files from the directory in which they resided...easy enough to do via FTP. Then I edited the export file containing my Blogger archives in an attempt to correct the image links (at that point, I didn't realize the problems caused by the bad titles, so I didn't do much with them), and re-ran MT's Import function.

Oh. My. Gosh.

I now had duplicates of every archive!

Some of you are no doubt either laughing or just shaking your heads in that condescending way we all do around those who are just a little slower than average. For you know what I didn't...but I do now. Those archives are not simply files in a directory on a web server. They are actually housed in that MySQL database that was so frustrating to create. So when I thought I was deleting the offending archives and uploading replacements, all I was really doing is asking MT to build duplicate archives.

In hindsight, it would have been faster just to delete the whole database and start over. But then I wouldn't have learned to use the great phpMyAdmin interface that's built into my webhosting account's CPanel. What a great tool! It was tedious work, but I was able to delete the duplicate entries (one at a time; is there a batch delete? Anyone?), edit the titles and fix a few image links that I had missed the first time around.

Fortunately, I've never been a really voluminous blogger. Plus, Blogger had hosed a couple of months of archives so they are lost forever. Bottom line is that I had only about 150 or so posts to wade through (well, 300, if you count the duplicates). It more than filled a couple of hours this afternoon.

Anyway, I think I've got the site about 80% to where I want it. I still have some tweaking to do on the more esoteric templates (like Comments), and there are a number of settings that I either don't understand or just haven't yet located. Bottom line, though, is that I'm glad I made the switch, and I'll probably pop over to the MT website in just a minute and make a donation.

Oh, and there's one other site I need to visit...blogger.com. There's one last item of business to take care of over there — I need to click on the "delete this blog" button!

P.S. I'll be happy to correspond with anyone making a similar switch, if my experiences will be helpful. I'm always good at being the cautionary example.

P.P.S. I promise...no more MT-migration posts. Let's find something else to talk about, shall we?