2006.09.24
Cleaning Archives
A couple days ago I imported all the old posts into this site and OOKEE.com. The articles for my site appear to have come through unscathed, but for some reason most of the articles at OOKEE.com are mangled. Probably because of weird formatting issues with the original text files.
I’m going through and fixing all of that, but it’s a long and slow process. There were about 2000 articles spanning three years. I’ve started at the beginning (January of 2003) and have been working my way forward in time. I’m currently up to September, 2003. Yikes!
So posting here and there might be slower than usual for while. Please bear with it!
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4 Responses to “Cleaning Archives”
- Jason Clark says (September 25th, 2006 at 13:02:42 )
What kind of mangling? Think it’s something that could be automated? Either the cleanup, or perhaps nuke the imported content (via MySql) and try another import with an improved rss20 flavour? Drop me a line if you want a hand.
- douglas says (September 25th, 2006 at 19:36:16 )
Mostly it was line breaks and some particular characters (like em-dashes). I think for that I should have had the content-type as UTF-8, which I didn’t think to change. Another problem was that I forgot to disable the seemore plugin so those articles I’m having to locate and remake. The final, and biggest, problem were the random line breaks in the firt 13 or 14 months. After that they clear up (at least so far; I’m in Sept 2004 now) but before that it was almost every single article.
I’m sure there would be some simple way of fixing the problems so they don’t appear again, but I’m having too much fun going through everything and reading posts from bygone days. Unless you’re interested in being an editor for OOKEE.com I think I’ll just keep plugging along!
- CT says (September 27th, 2006 at 11:14:59 )
I don’t envy you. Actually, I’m slated to import my old Blogger/BlogSpot blog, which I haven’t been able to do via WP’s import tool (not sure which end is screwing it up, and I’ve already wasted far too much time on trying to divine it). I’ve consigned myself to doing it by hand — about two years worth of 4-6 daily posts. Yikes. Maybe once I quit my job…
- douglas says (September 27th, 2006 at 11:39:09 )
That’s kind of strange that the Blogger import isn’t working. I helped my ex get her stuff migrated to her new site and it was remarkably pain free. However she didn’t have nearly the volume you have, either.
I wonder if there’s a way to export your entries in another format and then import it to Wordpress? That is essentially what I had to do. I think if I were you I would look for any sort of thing to mitigate bringing things over in an automated way; you must have thousands of posts!
