March 12, 2006

When I started on a recent project, which required an import of a blogger.com blog to a movable type blog, I found many sites which claimed to have the proper code. However every time I tried to use their system, my movable type system would say, “all data processed successfully”, but it was completely blank. Thus, I thought it would be nice of me to post the actual, and right way to do it.  

First you have to change some settings in your blogger admin. Go to Settings > Formatting, and choose type in 999 posts in the show box. (This is the max.)

Then, (and this confused me a little bit), forget about the DATE HEADER FORMAT box, and go down to TIMESTAMP FORMAT box. Choose MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS PM. It is the first option.

Then move down to where it says, “CONVERT LINE BREAKS” and choose NO.

Then down to SHOW TITLE FIELD, and choose YES.

Then ENABLE FLOAT ALIGNMENT, and choose NO.

HIT SAVE SETTINGS

Now, move onto SETTINGS > COMMENTS in the top tabs. Scroll down to COMMENTS TIMESTAMP FORMAT and again choose MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS PM, (the second option).

HIT SAVE SETTINGS

Now move on to TEMPLATE > EDIT CURRENT in the top tabs.

Copy and paste the code below into the field, and hit PREVIEW. Contrary to every other set of instructions, you do not need to actually save and publish your blog thus screwing it up. You just need to preview, and do a view source. Save this source, upload it to a folder inside of your Movable type directory, called import. (Create it, if it doesn’t exist.) Then go to your Movable type blog admin, go to the blog you want to import to, and choose the IMPORT EXPORT link in the left nav. Edit the settings you want to import with and GO. Hope that helped.

— copy starting below this line —

TITLE: <$BlogItemTitle$>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
—–
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>

—–
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: <$BlogCommentAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogCommentDateTime$>
<$BlogCommentBody$>

——–

—–
——–

— stop copying just before this line —