HOWTO migrate from blosxom to wordpress

For my piece of mind, please backup your wordpress database before proceeding. I don't want my instructions to cause you to lose data.

• Grab my mt blosxom flavor files and add to your $datadir. Right-click to save these files:
  content_type.mt date.mt, foot.mt , head.mt, story.mt


• Edit story.mt and change the line "AUTHOR: marc" to whatever
  username you will be using.


• If you are using the blosxom clicktrack plugin (00clicktrack),
  disable it.


• Visit your blosxom site using the mt flavor:
  http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt and save it into a
  file named import in your wp-admin directory. You may want to try
  this: lynx -dump http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt >
  wp-admin/import.txt


• Take a look at the import.txt file you just created. There are some
  things you may want to fix now rather than after the import.
  
  • Lines are wrapped at 79 characters, so long URLs or entry titles may be broken.
  
  
  • If you have a habit of using a bunch of dashes to separate text, the importer
    may get confused and think it is the beginning of a new entry. Consider replacing
    - with =
  
  
  • All the categories will be something like /nh (based on the pathname). You may want
    to remove the leading slash. You can fix this after import and well as build up
    a category hierarchy, so it isn't a big deal.
  
  
  
  



• Follow the standard WordPress instructions for import-mt.php.



• If you don't like your categories named with a leading slash (eg:
  /nh), then edit your new WordPress categories.



• Start going through your posts and clean up any messes...

I'm migrating from blosxom to wordpress

My webhoster just setup MySQL access for my site so tonight I'm migrating.

Rael has done a great job with Blosxom, but I wanted blogging engine was web-based (del.icio.us shows how nice such interface can be) and that had a large active development community.

The fact that my webhoster doesn't charge extra for MySQL is a plus too.

Once I've migrated I'll post the blosxom flavor I wrote to help the migration. It basically generates a Movable Type export format that WordPress can import using import-mt.php.

Take a look and then bookmark this new location: http://www.nozell.com/blog

Damn Blog writeback spammers

The bastards started spamming my writebacks with links to their site.
I've disabled writebacks for the time being, just email your comments
using the link below.

Saving bandwith with new blosxom plugin

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa just announced a cool new blosxom plugin, href="http://bulknews.net/lib/archives/gzip">gzip . In a
surprising small amount of code, it will transparently compress pages
served out by blosxom. Get it!

Updated blosxom plugin 'find'

My lunchtime hack was to extend href="http://fletcher.freeshell.org/weblog/index.html">Fletcher
T. Penney's blosxom plugin href="http://www.blosxom.com/plugins/search/find.htm">'find' to
allow the last few search terms to be displayed by the blosxom
template.

Use href="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/find-0.4.mn1">my version of
the find plugin and put $find::recentsearches in your head.html
template.

Who is osbourne.homeip.net?

I was checking out my access logs and saw that osbourne.homeip.net
is referencing a bunch of images on my webserver. It looks like they
are using blosxom as some sort of aggregator. Take a look at href="http://osbourne.homeip.net/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi">http://osbourne.homeip.ne
t/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi.



Its nic
e to be noticed, I suppose.

I'm guessing their day job is at lexis-nexis.com and it looks like
they use a sun workstation to surf. :-)

Now using 'Purple Haze' CSS template

Over at Open Source Web Design I found
a Haran's 'Purple Haze' template that give a table-like layout without
using the TABLE tag, strictly CSS.

blosxom plug-in: setiuserstasts v0.1

NAME
Blosxom Plug-in: setiuserstats

SYNOPSIS
Provides SETI@home individual user stats for use in your blog.

Get it here: href="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/setiuserstats-v0.1">http://www.nozel
l.com/marc/blog/data/setiuserstats-v0.1

Until I get XML::Simple installed at my webhosting site, see it in
action here.

debpackagetag blosxom plugin

I've created (well, heavily borrowed from href="http://indigoid.net/">John Slee's googletag) a new Blosxom
plugin, href="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/plugins/debpackagetag">debpackagetag.
I've been putting links to debian.org's package search engine in href="http://www.nozell.com/cgi/blosxom/linux/debian/laptop">my
debian laptop blog entries and this saves a ton of typing.

For example type <debpackage>blosxom</debpackage> to
get a link to the debian page for blos
xom.

Blosxom 2.0 beta *3*

Boy, Rael is really crankin' out the releases -- href="http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/download.shtml">blosxom 2.0
beta 3 is out and you're using it right now.

Blosxom 2.0 beta 2

I bit the bullet and installed href="http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/download.shtml">blosxom 2.0
beta 2 and love the href="http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/plugin.shtml">new plugin
ability. So far I've added the calendar and categories to the right
side of the page.

man page for blosxom

For debian, I wrote a man page for blosxom. Any comments before I
check it it? Note that it refers to blosxom 0+5i...

• Text


• PDF


• PostScript

emacs mode for faster blogging -- dme:blog.el

While googling on wikis and blogs, I found David Edmondson's nice
emacs hack: href="http://www.hollytree-house.co.uk/dme/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/emacs">http://ww
w.hollytree-house.co.uk/dme/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/emacs.

M-x dme:blog prompts for a blog entry name which
eventually is tied to the final filename. C-c s sets the
blog entry category (read subdirectory, perhaps nested ones) and
finally it uses the cvs check-in keystroke C-s # to 'commit'
the blog by writing it to your blog directory with the creation time
part of the filename. For example this file is saved as
200302101358_blogging-emacs-mode.txt. The editing buffer is
in HTML major mode, so all the HTML editing binding are set.

I'm not too keen on how html-mode puts all the HTML 'dressing' at the
top and bottom of the entry -- it is nice for random web pages but a
bit over kill for a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/~rael/lang/perl/blosxom/">blosxom
entry. Perhaps a hack using html-mode-hook to remove the 'dressing'
is in order.

Patch for dme:blog.el to add post-find-hook

Here is a patch I sent to href="http://www.hollytree-house.co.uk/dme">David Edmondson to let
people customize the blog buffer the way they want it.

cd ~/
diff -c /home/marc/dme\:blog.el.orig /home/marc/dme\:blog.el
*** /home/marc/dme:blog.el.orig Mon Feb 10 14:39:09 2003
--- /home/marc/dme:blog.el      Mon Feb 10 14:44:11 2003
***************
*** 32,44 ****
  ;; at:
  ;; http://www.hollytree-house.co.uk/dme/log/
  
  ;; Feedback encouraged !
  
  (require 'easy-mmode)
  
  ;;; Customisation:
  
! (defvar dme:blog-destinations '(("~/var/blog" nil nil t))
    "A alist of places where the blog entries should be published.  Each
  entry in the list has four elements:
    dir     - the directory,
--- 32,55 ----
  ;; at:
  ;; http://www.hollytree-house.co.uk/dme/log/
  
+ ;; Marc Nozell       Mon Feb 10 14:44:04 2003
+ ;; Added dme:blog-post-find-hook so he could clean up the fixup the
+ ;; buffer after html-mode put in its stuff.
+ ;;
+ ;; Example:
+ ;; (add-hook 'dme:blog-post-find-hook '(lambda () 
+ ;;                         (erase-buffer)
+ ;;                         (goto-char (point-min))))
+ 
+ 
+ 
  ;; Feedback encouraged !
  
  (require 'easy-mmode)
  
  ;;; Customisation:
  
! (defvar dme:blog-destinations '(("~/public_html/blog" nil nil t))
    "A alist of places where the blog entries should be published.  Each
  entry in the list has four elements:
    dir     - the directory,
***************
*** 61,66 ****
--- 72,80 ----
  (defvar dme:blog-pre-commit-hook nil
    "Hook run just before a blog entry is committed.")
  
+ (defvar dme:blog-post-find-hook nil
+   "Hook run just after the blog entry is created.")
+ 
  (defvar dme:blog-category nil
    "The category of the current blog item.  This is simply a directory
  below the blog directory (see the Blosxom documentation for more
***************
*** 168,173 ****
--- 182,190 ----
              (insert body)))))
    
    (html-mode)
+   ; ready to start editing
+   (run-hooks 'dme:blog-post-find-hook)
+ 
    (dme:blog-mode t))
  
  (defun dme:blog-gnus-pretty-group (group)

Diff finished at Mon Feb 10 14:44:16

Blosxom 0+5i

Rael released a new version of
blosxom. While he
didn't take my suggestion of adding a way to tag entries with icons,
he did rework blosxom to walk down through directories looking for
entries. At least I can keep entries organized a bit more.

Currently my categories are:

top
   |-- blosxom/
   |-- eye-candy/
   |-- family/
   |   |-- kids/A>
   |   ·-- 
marc/
   |-- geocaching/
   |-- linux/
   |   |-- apps/>
   |   |-- config
/
   |   |-- debian
/
   |   ·-- t
ips/
   ·-- us/
       ·-- civil-liberties/

A tip of the hat to the Linux command href="ftp://mama.indstate.edu/linux/tree/">tree which generated
the initial HTML for the above.

Integrating blosxom with Evolution

Ximian's Evolution, an Outlook look-alike for Linux, is now my primary email client and can display RSS headlines on its 'Summary' page. To have blosxom (version 0+3i) to display, create a newsfeed with a URL like this: http://www.nozell.com/cgi-bin/blosxom/xml. Don't get it wrong since Evolution 1.0.2+ doesn't seem to have a way of changing a newsfeed once created. (Hint: edit ~/evolution/RDF-urls.txt)

blosxom-0+2i patch

blosxom 0+2i incorrectly sorts entries. Sent Rael a patch to use mtime instead of ctime.

Write on the laptop, publish on website

I typically use my Linux laptop for work and surfing, so I've wrote a
one-liner to use rsync to securely update my blog notes. If you use
ssh-agent, you won't even need to type your ssh password more than
once a day.

#!/bin/bash
rsync --exclude '*~' -azv -e ssh ~/public_html/blog/*.txt nozell@www.nozell.com
:~/HTML/marc/blog/

First entry

Blosxom looks
nice and simple. Unfortunately I always misspell it.