Dave’s Rants

Well I’m currently in the process of moving over to my lovely new shiny server and importing my Blogger posts into MT and the importing thing is a lot harder than I thought it would be!

Firstly I tried things like it said in the MT Manual but that just gave me a load of empty posts. So I did a little Googling and found out that MT prefers it if you give it .txt files for the import input. So I came up with the Dave O’Neill Method™

1. Log into your Blogger account, then switch into template-editing mode.

2. Make a copy of your current template; you will be replacing your Blogger template with the conversion template in Step 3, but you probably don’t want to lose your original template.

3. Replace your Blogger template with the following.

NOTE: if you are exporting from Blogger Pro, add this line before the AUTHOR: line:

4. Enter the Settings area for this weblog.

5. Change your Blog Filename to a different filename; this will prevent you from overwriting your main index file.

6. In Formatting, set your weblog to display all of your posts on the main index page. There is no explicit setting for this; instead, you should change the number of days displayed on your front page (Show N days’ posts on main page) higher than the number of days that you have been weblogging.

7. Set Date/Time Format to the format MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS AM|PM. (Note: the format will not look like this in the menu; instead it will be the current time, formatted.)

8. Set Convert Line Breaks to No.

9. Set Archive Frequency to No Archive. This will prevent your archives from being overwritten with the new template.

10. Click Save Changes and now republish the blog

11. Log onto your host where the MT weblog is stored using Telnet/SSH

12. Change to your mt directory and make a new directory called import

13. Download your blogger entries to this location and rename to a .txt file

14. Now just follow the rules for importing in the MT Manual and you’ll be flying.