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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…

The ‘Live Comment Preview’ hack that I use on The Long Letter has now been implemented here on Eclecticism. If you know what I’m talking about, then we’re good to go. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then click on the “Comments” link to any post, type something in the comment box, and look just below the comment box. It’s a nifty trick. ;)

I originally picked this up from ScriptyGoddess, with help from Phillip. Geeky tech details on my implementation here follow.

All this is is a nice little JavaScript addition to the page. I don’t believe that this will constitute a security risk, but I’m no expert, so use at your own risk. ;) Obviously, if you do want to use this on your site, you’ll need to have access to your templates.

In the header of the individual entry template, just after the already included JavaScript bits, I added the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
 var newline = /n/g;
 function ReloadTextDiv() {
  var NewText = document.getElementById("text").value;
  NewText = NewText.replace(newline, "<br />");
  var DivElement = document.getElementById("TextDisplay");
  DivElement.innerHTML = NewText;
  }
</script>

Then, in the body of the template, just after the closing </div> tag following the preview and submit buttons, but before the </form> tag, I added the following:

<br />
<h2>Live Comment Preview:</h2>
<span id="TextDisplay">Note: if you're comfortable with HTML, feel free to use it in your comments. If not, just type away. Single returns will be automatically converted into linebreaks (&lt;br /&gt;), double returns will be converted into paragraph breaks (&lt;p&gt;). This text will disappear as soon as you start typing.</span>

Lastly, in the textarea tag that defines where the comment text is entered in by a visitor, I added a onkeyup="ReloadTextDiv();" declaration. The full textarea tag should look as follows:

<textarea tabindex="4" id="text" name="text" rows="10" style="width: 80%;" onkeyup="ReloadTextDiv();">

What all this does is actually simple enough. As a visitor enters their comment into the comment box, each time they release a key the onkeyup function calls the ReloadTextDiv JavaScript snippet that I added. This function loads any text inside the comment box (identified by its ID of "text"), replaces any carriage returns with <br /> tags so that line breaks appear correctly, then writes the output into the element identified as "TextDisplay" — in this case, between the span tags I added after the submit and preview buttons.

If you find this useful, feel free to use it in your own pages. While I wouldn’t refuse credit, it really does belong to ScriptyGoddess and Phillip. Enjoy!