(Moving to Drupal)

Originally posted: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:28:46

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I have been disappointed by MovableType in many ways: the fact that SixApart has begun charging for it, the slowness, the limitations that come with using a stripped-down content management system (which is what a blog is). What's been holding me back until now has been the difficulty in migrating. Moving a year's worth of book reviews is not something one does through cutting and pasting.

Drupal provides several ways to migrate, but they all involve hacks, and they present multiple other problems. Finally, I did this:

1. I set my old blog's RSS feed to show all my archives in their entirety.
2. I pulled the feed into Drupal's aggregator.
3. I fired up mysql, figured out what table held the aggregator data and the blog data, and dumped the aggregator table into a SQL file.
4. I then hand-edited the SQL file to move the data into the blog table.
5. Finally, I edited the blog module (written in PHP, I think, with added SQL statements) so the blog would display in reverse chronological order rather than in order of nodes (don't ask).

Drupal people: It shouldn't be that hard to write a decent converter. Come on.

Anyway, this is the third blogger package I've used. (The original blog was on BlogSpot). Hopefully I won't have to migrate again.

Finally, an update. I have ordered a horrendous number of books from Amazon, so expect a flood of reviews soon. Currently I'm working through Kaufer and Butler's Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, to be followed by Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Machiavelli's Discourses.

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