Importing MT archives: month by month

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This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on July 27, 2003). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

I’m starting work on importing my archives from The Long Letter into Eclecticism.

What I’m dealing with is simply the fact that I have archives dating back to November of 2000. While Movable Type has an ‘export’ feature, it exports everything. With fewer posts, that might be less of an issue, but since I’m going to have to go through post-by-post to double-check URLs, add pictures, and so on, I wanted to see if I could figure out how to import one month’s worth of posts at a time, instead of the whole kit and kaboodle.

Here’s what I ended up with…

  1. Create a new Archive Template, and put the following code into the template: 
     TITLE:
 AUTHOR:
 DATE:
 PRIMARY CATEGORY:
 CATEGORY:
 -----
 BODY:

 -----
 EXTENDED BODY:

 -----
 EXCERPT:

 -----
 COMMENT:

 AUTHOR:

 EMAIL:

 URL:

 IP:

 DATE:

 -----
 PING:

 TITLE:

 URL:

 IP:

 BLOG NAME:

 DATE:

 -----
 --------
  2. In MT, under the ‘Weblog Config’ button, go to the ‘Archiving’ section. Click the ‘Add new…’ button, set the Archive Type to ‘Monthly’, and the ‘Template’ to the name of the new template that you just created, then click ‘Add.’

  3. You should now have two options under the ‘Monthly’ archive type. Switch over to the new archive template that you just created, and put the following in the ‘Archive File Template’ box:

    export/.txt

  4. Click the ‘Rebuild Site’ option, choose the ‘Rebuild Monthly Archive Only’ option, and click the ‘Rebuild’ button.

    Once MT is done rebuilding, you should have a series of files inside an ‘export’ directory inside your site’s archives directory (in my case, that ended up being /longletter/archives/export/, your configuration may be slightly different). There will be one file for each month, named something like 2003-07.txt.

  5. In TypePad, under the ‘Manage’ tab for your weblog, choose the ‘Import/Export’ option. In box A, put in the URL for your first month’s export file (for me, this was http://www.djwudi.com/longletter/archives/export/2000-11.txt). Leave the ‘Encoding’ drop-down menu set to ‘Unicode’, and hit the ‘Import’ button.

  6. There is no step 6. You’re done!

So that’s it. Now that I can go month by month, I’ll import one month, go through each post to make sure all the links are correct, then move on to the next month. This will probably take a while, as I’ve got close to three years of posts to check, but I’m on my way!

And the word ‘PROJECT’ flashed before my eyes…