Blogger.com to Movable Type Conversion

October 19 2004 – 11:11pm

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for awhile. Don’t worry, I’m not a blog abandoner, I have been investing my blogging time in transferring my blog from blogger to Movable Type, and it has been a much more involved process than I had anticipated. If you’ve been considering making the move, I suggest that if you are in fact going to do it, do it as soon as possible.

To do so, I had to:

Switch my hosting from Go Daddy to FatCow, for one, because FatCow is much less confusing, but also because they provide a cgi-bin. Movable Type requires CGI.
Import my Blogger content. This involved changing all of my Blogger settings so that all of my posts would show up on one page. The fun part was manually inserting all of the comments into the resulting file, which was then imported into Movable Type. Some of the dates, orders, and times of my comments may not be entirely accurate because of this. Sorry.
Build my Movable Type templates. Instead of one template, like Blogger, Movable Type has several. I tried to battle error-prone redundancy with PHP includes, but anything that contains Movable Type tags must be in the template itself.
Make sure my old archive files wouldn’t be indexed by search engines anymore. Blogger and Movable Type use different naming conventions for their files, so posts with the same title as before, have different filenames, since I changed the location of my archives to /blog/archives/, just in case I ever have to move the index of my blog to /blog/, I simply disallowed my old archive directories with my robots.txt file.

So, now my blog is operational again, but there are still a few more things that need to be done:

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Refine my templates and stylesheets. Things are still a bit messy, visually.
Review the semantic markup. I noticed that MT makes the date an h2 and the post title an h3. That’s ridiculous! Maybe I’ll get a better search ranking next time someone searches for “October.” Didn’t notice if Blogger did it any differently, however.
Categorize my posts. That “Categories” header looks pretty dorky all alone.
Make a seperate “portfolio” blog. I need to get more of my GD work up here. I’ll add a tab above once its started up.
Get a Google AdSense account. Maybe I can cover 1% of that hefty $99/year hosting plan.

I’m sure there’s much more, but I’m glad this Blogging thing is workiing out. Blogger was a good, low-risk, low-maintenance way to get started. I just hope MT won’t prove to be too much work for me to ever post.