URLs lost when importing from MovableType / TypePad

[Leo Dirac]

Thanks for releasing these very useful tools! They are however still
not at a place where I can use them. The problem is that the
MovableType export format does not include the URLs of the posts.
Blogger picks sensible URLs -- often better than what was there before
-- but changing these will break all inbound links to the blog. For a
mature blog, this would be quite bad. For me, it's a total blocker to
switching.

So how to fix this? Atom feeds include the URLs, but are missing a
bunch of other things like comments and drafts. I'm also not totally
sure that Atom feeds include all the posts for mature blogs. They
certainly don't after going through feedburner. A command-line
version could merge a MovableType export file and and an atom feed,
but this wouldn't be easy for the appspot hosted version. Without
having looked at the code, I expect this would be a medium-hard
change, mostly because of the merge. I started work on an importer
using atom here http://www.embracingchaos.com/2008/12/moving-from-typ.html
which might be helpful.

Another option would be to crawl the site using http, which would be
something like a complete rewrite. Or if the blog is fully indexed by
Google, that might provide an easier mechanism to identify the URL for
each post.

Other thoughts on what would be the best way to approach this?

[JJ Lueck]

Hi Leo,

I agree with you. The linking of existing URLs from one service to
the URL of the post on the new service is indeed a difficult problem.
Since MovableType doesn't support providing the actual URL to the link
in it's text-based export format, and because there are a number of
ways to do it (all of which are not ideal), support for this within
the conversion process was left out. MovableType does have a more
extensive XML output format, but I have not yet looked at it in-depth
to see whether this information can be pulled successfully into the
converted document.

Adding support for appending links from original URLs as text in the
body of the converted post would be a nice feature to add to all
conversion in this project. If you'd like to team up on extending
MovableType support in this way, please let me know and I'll
collaborate with you on it.

On Jan 11, 9:28 pm, Leo Dirac <leo.di...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for releasing these very useful tools!  They are however still
> not at a place where I can use them.  The problem is that the
> MovableType export format does not include the URLs of the posts.
> Blogger picks sensible URLs -- often better than what was there before
> -- but changing these will break all inbound links to the blog.  For a
> mature blog, this would be quite bad.  For me, it's a total blocker to
> switching.
>
> So how to fix this?  Atom feeds include the URLs, but are missing a
> bunch of other things like comments and drafts.  I'm also not totally
> sure that Atom feeds include all the posts for mature blogs.  They
> certainly don't after going through feedburner.  A command-line
> version could merge a MovableType export file and and an atom feed,
> but this wouldn't be easy for the appspot hosted version.  Without
> having looked at the code, I expect this would be a medium-hard
> change, mostly because of the merge.  I  started work on an importer

> using atom herehttp://www.embracingchaos.com/2008/12/moving-from-typ.html