Staffan Malmgrens blogg

I finally made good on my promise to restore the old entries from when this blog was running on dasBlog. I tried my best to make sure you people reading this through RSS didn’t get a bunch of duplicated posts, but if your reader refreshed at the wrong time you might have. This operation is not yet big enough to warrant a separate test server, and besides, we’ve already established that I’m a lazy lazy man.

The job ended up being more than 15 minutes of quick-and-dirty scripting, mostly because the old data was full of small gotchas (one example: in blosxom everything is files, so it’s a good idea to have descriptive file names. The most descriptive thing in my old entries was, naturally, the title. However, that wasn’t unique (I made a lot of posts titled “Quickies of the day”, for examples), and so I had to implement “Windows-style” name un-collision code (e.g quickies_of_the_day_2.txt)

If someone wants the code, it’s here. Run it like “dasblog2blosxom.pl *.dayentry.xml > redirect.map”. The redirect.map file is for making sure that old dasBlog URLs still work with Apache’s mod_rewrite and the following rule set:

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteMap testmap txt:/path/to/redirect.map
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^guid=(.*)
    RewriteRule /PermaLink\.aspx ${testmap:%1} [R=301,NE]
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^guid=(.*)
    RewriteRule /Trackback\.aspx ${testmap:%1} [R=301,NE]
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^guid=(.*)
    RewriteRule /CommentView\.aspx ${testmap:%1} [R=301,NE]

(big up to has for helping me with the mod_rewrite magic)

There are probably bugs that weren’t exposed by my blog data. Also, I’m stil new to Python programming, and things might not be done in the most pytonish way. Do not use the code as a guideline on how to do stuff.

The comments that people wrote in on the old setup are not yet restored. That is a project for another late night.

Tags: blosxom, metablogging

This entry was posted on tisdag, augusti 31st, 2004 at 23:11 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.