Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Well, damn skippy!
All right, that took long enough. But yes, in fact, I was able to dump the entirety of HongPong.com into Drupal, by first going from MovableType to WordPress, and then using the fine and polished 'Wordpress to Drupal Migration Utility' module by Borek Bernard at borber.com.
Notably, my beloved lengthy headlines have been truncated a bit, but this is due to Drupal's maximum headline size, which is going to have to be hacked. This was not the fault of Wordpress or Borek. Also some HTML encodings, like for example ampersands, have become garbled. HTML encodings are the tricky monster of MySQL, so there are other messed up characters yet to be found.
I imported this onto a new test Drupal server at
http://drupal-test.hongpong.com .
This will probably be molded into the production server, and I will just copy over the customizations already at
drupal.hongpong.com .
Thanks for your patience with this process. The colossal technical hurdle that held things back (apart from my laziness) was overcome with a triple-bank shot. Thanks too to WordPress. Excellent software but not quite right for the task at hand.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING US OVER THE YEARS.
THANK YOU, C.I.A., DEPTS PENTAGON, STATE AND JUSTICE FOR VISITING AND AMUSING ME.
(you guys ain't seen nothing yet)
THANK YOU CONTRIBUTORS FOR ROCKIN.
THANK YOU SPAMMERS FOR BOOSTING OUR GOOGLE RANK!
MOVABLETYPE IS AT AN END.
HONGPONG.COM (VERSION 6?) IS ON THE WAY.
This is one of those annoying times for engineering this site. Currently running on MovableType 2.661, the last free version they offered, but on the new, faster and generally good web hosting I now get from PowWeb, it glitches out. I get out of memory errors when posting, and the Total Post Exporter function doesn't work completely.
I want to get the site into Drupal, and I've decided it's gonna 'go live' before I have perfected its design. Anything would be better than this situation, and I have a couple folks who want to contribute goodies when it's finally working. They have been very patient, but it's taken far too long to kick this process into action.
Unfortunately, the big stumbling block so far has been getting the data from MT into Drupal. There are a number of methods that people have devised, but each suffers from certain drawbacks: version incompatibilities, failing to import categories, and other toxic problems.
So I have been checkmated and unwilling to deal with muddling through this while programming all day at work. But just now, an obvious potential solution has popped into my head.
Last summer I experimented with yet another popular Open Source blog platform, WordPress, which is quite good and fairly mature now. I got most of the site put together, but there were some problems I didn't like in how it structured things. Drupal solves these problems - namely heirarchical categories/tags/taxonomies. All these billions of del.icio.us bookmarks I've been making in the last couple weeks are closely related to this scheme.
Most importantly, I was able to import all of Hongpong.com, including the comments, from Movable Type into WordPress. I did this at least twice, so I know it works.
So today I thought, if MovableType > Drupal is not working, why not try MovableType > WordPress > Drupal ?
So I just installed Wordpress again, simply to pull this off. It's so crazy, it just might work!! Please stand by............
Drupal.hongpong.com - i swear it'll happen!! (Currently it's just a few test posts) Eventually!!!!