Movable Type provides some fairly decent instructions on how to do this, but I wanted more than just a simple import. The rest of this post details how I migrated my blogger/blogspot content over to Movable Type. I hope someone somewhere finds it helpful.
Step 1: Exporting from Blogger
- Log into Blogger and select the blog you wish to export
- Click the Settings tab
- Click the Formatting tab
- Change Show value to 999 Days
- Change the Timestamp Format to "mm/dd/yy hh:mm:ss xx"
- Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page
- Now click the Template tab
- Select all the template text and press delete
- Copy the template from below and paste it into the template window
- Click the Preview button
- When the new browser window appears, click the View option and then Source (this will open up notepad with the exported data)
- At the top of the document, delete all lines above (and including) the <body> tag
- At the bottom of the document, delete all lines below (and including) the </body> tag
- Save the file as "import.txt"
- Back in the blogger window, click the Cancel button
- Click the Formatting tab
- Change Show value to its original value
- Change the Timestamp Format to its original value
- Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page
<Blogger> AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$> DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$> TITLE: <PostSubject><$BlogItemSubject$></PostSubject> PRIMARY CATEGORY: STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ----- BODY: <$BlogItemBody$> -------- </blogger>
Step 2: Massaging Your Export File
Categories: To categorize the posts, simply type the category after the PRIMARY CATEGORY: line for each post. Movable Type is kind enough to automatically create the categories during the import, but that also means that any typos will also be created. It is very possible to categorize the posts after they are imported so this is completely optional. I chose to do it this way because I wanted to get to work and was still waiting for my dns to resolve. Hindsight tells me that it is definitely easier to categorize from within Movable Type.
Comments: If you want to bring your comments with you, then you need to understand how the import format works. The eight dashes which follow the content of each post mark the end of the post. To add a comment to the file, simply insert the following immediately below the post content and above the eight dashes:
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: EMAIL: URL: DATE: mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss (comment)
Step 3: Importing into Movable Type
- FTP to your host and open the directory where you installed Movable Type
- Create a new directory named "import" and open that directory
- Transfer the import file (import.txt) into the import directory
- Log into Movable Type and select the target weblog
- Click Import Entries
- Click the Import as me box (unless you want to preserve the original users)
- Select a default category - if you want one
- Click the Import button
- Republish the weblog
UPDATE: This process has been tested and it does work with the latest release of blogger (version number unknown but whatever version was active on 08/04/2004).
If you decide to try these instructions with MT 3.0, please let me know how it turns out.
UPDATE: Discarded Lies has taken this template and added blogger comments.
