Good News! Jason Levine’s Frontier script has worked! Susan now has a working MT Import File. Jason says he’ll be posting his script in the next few days, and since UserLand offfers a 60-day trial version of Manila for download (thanks, Alwin, for the tip), I’m hopeful that we can come up with a procedure for people to export their own sites. Many thanks to Sam Ruby for the A-list publicity and support.
<snideComment>Funny that a bunch of ex-Manila users had to do this by themselves, and that noone from UserLand or weblogs.com even acknowledged our effort.</snideComment>
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“Is lost and gone forever”. Or not, as I later found out. As you were.
Well, in the interest of fairness…. Dave Winer, the UserLand Chairman, but who no longer works for UserLand, and until recently, the administrator of weblogs.com, did point to my attempts to export, waving a big Scripting News-sized flag to send aid my way.
And in an email to Dave and a post to Rogers, I made them aware of what I’ve been doing and of my documenting the steps thereof. Oh, and for that matter, I told Anil Dash, too, thanks to that Intertwingly thread at Sam Ruby’s. (heck, for grins, and the interim step, I may plop my 5MB export file at TypePad to see how it works in MT, but I don’t think that’ll be the final step) I gather that they (Dave, Rogers, Anil) thought it all under control, and that for Dave W and Rogers C, getting a new post-weblogs.com server on line is more important than dealing with my needs. Were I in their position, I’d prolly do the same (a shattering blow to my delusions that I am, indeed the Verie Centre of the Universe! Who Knew?).
I have received help (for TheXmlFiles tool) from Jeff Cheney, who does have an official capacity with UserLand in special implementations and installations. Of course, I contacted him as one on the Frontier Developers list, having read and forgotten the Official UserLand connection.
That being said, it’s very telling that…. (a) it’s taken 20 days for me, from start to finish, to export my site from Manila to a format that some other blog software can use; (b) in addition to Jeff Cheney, mentioned already, the solutions came from either those-who’ve-moved-on (like you, Al, and Jason) or else from former UserLand staff (BIG hat tip to Andre Radke) who’ve helped me understand what to do next/cobble a solution together; (c) the export tool that UserLand provides so that its users are not “locked in the trunk” (witness this DaveNet then-CEO of UserLand doctrine declaration so helpfully pointed out by Wes Felter as linked from Dave W during TGWCOSSoY2K+4) did not work as advertised and that using the official channels of help on the UserLand site did not work for me…. all speaks for itself. In a statement that so sums things up (I’d like to give credit to original coiner of this phrase, but for now the fact that it’s not me will have to suffice), “So is it really not lock-in if they provide a key but it doesn’t work?”
yow. I spent quite a while composing a response to this. Giving credit where it was due. Stupidly, I didn’t “copy” the contents of the posts (many links, etc.). then it didn’t take. sigh. Is lost and gone forever. ah well.
The first comment was sent to me for approval, since I’ve configured WordPress that any comments with more than 3 links are held before being published. Comments with lots of links are usually spam.
Well, I’ve tried an initial import test to see how Jason’s export script fared, as you can see on my transitional MT site. There’s a need for tweakage: Two News Item attributes, Categories (Departments) and URLs didn’t make the transition. Manila posts are complex little beasts, eh? (yes, Jason knows)
Dave has acknowledged this effort on Scripting News.
As for me, I’m preoccupied on Buzzword.Com keeping the new server online, establishing nightly backups, and helping users download their site backups. But I’ve corresponded with Susan and Jason Levine about their efforts and will be publicizing them on the server soon.
What I’d like is a UserTalk script that runs on Manila servers and spits out a site’s .root file as XML.
Rogers: “What I’d like is a UserTalk script that runs on Manila servers and spits out a site’s .root file as XML.” Is that XML the same/different from what TheXmlFiles is designed to do? I’d be thrilled to see that whole thing automated. Further, I’d love it if you (or someone or several someones) would at minimum, document the structures of that XML (see the Converting Manila wiki here), or develop some kind of conversion script to change that XML to another blog format. (Jason’s script, as best I know, works straight from the site root inside Frontier. I gather it’s related, but XML isn’t its beginning place.) I recall seeing a comment somewhere in the recent weblogs.com outage about some kind of interchange format; I have no idea what’s entailed in that, or if that’s another way of couching the whole rss/rdf/atom discussions that have been so lively. But it makes a whole lotta sense to me.
Of the task of writing docs/scripts to convert XML to another format/interchange format, I have no abilities in script-writing; the best I can provide to all of this is a clearly-documented account of my experiences/steps I took/lessons learned. I hope it may benefit someone else in his/her struggle to do the same, or to more clearly demonstrate the need for such a conversion tool.
[...] script that he wrote that works in an old version of Frontier. Some discussion of it is on this thread at papascott.de and in another discussion thread he says he’ll p [...]
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