Moving From Blogger To Movable Type 5

For the longest time, the Who2.com blog has been Blogger-based, making use of their FTP-publishing option (I'm part of the Who2 tech team).

Unfortunately, that option is being eliminated on May 1st of this year (2010).  So, we had to find another option.  After due consideration, we decided to convert from Blogger to Movable Type (MT).

There are some published methods for converting from Blogger to Movable Type, but they all appear to be based on using the Archive function and a template.

I'd like to offer this alternative method,  based on backing up your Blogger blog into the Atom Publishing Format (as opposed to exporting an archive), and a Perl program which I wrote.  It doesn't require you to change settings, change templates, or re-publish.

To back up your Blogger blog, begin by logging into your Blogger account.  Then click on Settings:

At the top of the Settings page, you'll see an option to Export Your Blog:

 

The next page has a big download button which will put the exported data on your hard drive:

 

At this point, you're half-done.  You should have a file like blog-03-31-2009.xml  on your hard drive.

Now all you have to do is run it through BloggerToMovableType.pl:

$ BloggerToMovableType.pl blog-03-31-2010.xml > mtimport.txt

The resulting mtimport.txt  file should be placed in the import subdirectory of your MovableType installation.

All that remains now is to import your blog using MovableType's import function:

This version doesn't  export Pings from Blogger (the logical translation is to MT trackbacks), and Blogger labels are imported as MT tags (not categories).

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Comments

[Fritz Holznagel]

Mike Duffy rocks the boiler room! Thank you, Duffy.

Sincerely,
The Editors of Who2.com