Converting from Blogger to Movable Type
05:24 PM - Jul 9, 2003
I’ve received several email questions about converting from Blogger to Movable Type, especially with an IIS server, so I thought I’d go ahead and pass along some information at my weblog.
An important difference between IIS installation and other servers is that you’ll probably need to change the .cgi file extensions to .pl file extensions along with any references to them.
Server permissions need to be set; however, your ISP will probably need to set those for you. This hasn’t been a problem at all with my ISP, and if your ISP uses IIS they ought to respond quickly to your needs for permissions and other things requiring them to do something on the server side.
I also had to tweak the code a bit for the trackback URLs to work. I found the answers at the Movable Type Support Forum, where there’s an explanation of what to do and the code to copy/paste. As soon as I tweaked the code and slightly changed the trackback URL format it worked fine.
These two tutorials are very helpful in addition to MT’s documentation:
Consistent markup is a huge help with importing your posts to another weblog tool. Movable Type will create titles for each post, either based on your title tags or using the first few words of text if you haven’t used titles. Blogger will export your posts to a plain text file. I backed up a copy of it and then did a few global search/replacements to make sure the markup was consistent, clean and lean. Just like painting, initial preparation can make all the difference in the outcome.
I also imported just a few posts to see how Movable Type handled things before I started importing more. Movable Type, however, choked on my file with posts dating back to 2000, but it seems to handle importing a few months' posts at a time OK.
I found a tip to include Blogger’s anchor tags for each post, too, a detail that isn’t mentioned in Movable Type’s instructions. If you use the standard template to export from Blogger, your anchor tags for each post won’t be included.
I can’t find the reference anywhere, but here’s the export Blogger template I found online that includes a field to export the anchor tag for each post. MT didn’t like the code, so I’ve uploaded it as a plain text file:
Note that if you don’t have any titles in your posts you can eliminate the TITLE field from this template.
You’ll find more templates at this site’s section, Reference: Movable Type Templates, Miscellaneous Templates.
There are plenty of helpful plugins to add features to Movable Type. Check out my Movable Type Links for some terrific plugins, templates, tips, and more.
I’ve got a lot of work to do before I’m settled in using Movable Type, especially with over 2-1/2 years' of archives, but the recent posts are online and Comments/Trackbacks are working. You’re welcome to stop in and leave a comment or question for this post or any others, but please excuse the dust and lack of design for the moment—I’ll figure out the design after I’ve worked out more details.
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