2007 May 07 - Mon

Importing a Blosxom Blog into Movable Type

I have my Blosxom based blog organized by category directories rather than by date. I've written a Perl script to take this collection of articles and transform them into a MovableType import file. My content files have a .txt extension. You'll need to change the match string if your extension is different from mine.

To run, there is a variable called dir which you seed with a starting directory. The program then scans that directory and further sub-directories looking for files with the designated suffix. It then uses the first line of a found file for the title. The third and subsequent lines are used for the content.

I've found that after importing, I'm not able to see the body in Movable Type's content editor. How weird... Well, it does show up when you customize the display of the page. It shows up in the extended entry text.

2007/06/12: David Graff suggested an additional print statement before the body block. I havn't tried it, but I hope it works to remedy the missing body bit.

Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
#use File::stat;
use Fcntl ':mode';

my $author = 'ray';
my $ext = '.txt';

my @dirs;
my $dir = '/var/www/html/blog';
push( @dirs, $dir );

while ( $dir = pop( @dirs) ) {
  chdir( $dir );
  opendir( DIR, $dir );
#  print( "$dir\n" );
  foreach my $file ( readdir( DIR) ) {
    if ( $file =~ /.txt$/ ) {
      my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                                                localtime((stat($file))[9]);
     $mon+=1;
     $year+=1900;
     $mon = substr( '0' . $mon, -2 ,2 );
     $mday = substr( '0' . $mday, -2, 2 );
     $hour = substr( '0' . $hour, -2, 2 );
     $min  = substr( '0' . $min, -2, 2 );
     $sec  = substr( '0' . $sec, -2, 2 );
     my $date = "$mon/$mday/$year $hour:$min:$sec";
#     print( "  $file: $date\n");

     open( FILE, '<' . $file );
     my $title = <FILE>;
     chomp( $title );

     my $body;
     my $extbody;
     my $line;
     my $summary = 1;
     while ( $line = <FILE> ) {
       if ( $summary ) {
         $body .= $line;
         if ( length( $line ) < 2 ) {
           $summary = 0;
           }
         }
       $extbody .= $line;
       }

     close( FILE );

     $dir =~ /\/([^\/]+$)/;
     my $category = $1;

     print( "AUTHOR: $author\n" );
     print( "TITLE:  $title\n" );
     print( "DATE: $date\n" );
     print( "PRIMARY CATEGORY: $category\n" );
     print( "STATUS: publish\n" );
#     print( "ALLOW COMMENTS: 1\n" );
#     print( "ALLOW PINGS: 1\n" );
     print("-----\n"); # 2007/06/12 insertion by David Graff
     print( "BODY:\n" . $body . "\n-----\n" );
     print( "EXTENDED BODY:\n" . $extbody . "\n-----\n" );
     print( "--------\n" );
     }

    my $mode = (stat($file))[2];
    if ( S_ISDIR( $mode ) ) {
      if ( '.' ne $file && '..' ne $file ) {
        push( @dirs, $dir . '/' . $file );
        }
      }
    }
  closedir( DIR );
  }