Welcome to the archive

It turns out that you can export and import posts from WordPress. Who could possibly have guessed? Unfortunately it also turns out that the default importer can only cope with files of size 50 Mb or less; so I’m having to learn how to cut up the archive and do it in bits. So far I’ve added 2017 – at least I have, if I get lucky.

Stoat-William-Connolley

If this works, then I’ll have to make up my mind whether I want to continue with WordPress at this mirror of the old site, scienceblogs.com/stoat/, or continue at mustelid.blogspot.com.  Do you have an opinion? Then tell me about it in the comments. I’ll update the below as I go on. In case you’re wondering, this is WordPress’s “free” option.

NOTE: you’re welcome to comment here, but be aware that in the “transition period” (roughly now to the end of the month) there will uncertainty over what gets preserved for the future; some comments may be lost. Furthermore, while I will see all comments here, over at scienceblogs.com/stoat, and at mustelid.blogspot.com; most readers will only be looking at one of those sites.

Blogger: pros

  • Google. Although not really up to their usual.

WordPress: pros

  • I can edit the comments.
  • I know how to configure moderation, to some extent.

Notes

I did 2017, 2016 and 2015; and then realised that links I’d inserted are to the old blog. They work at this moment, but will go blank. For 2014 I re-wrote the URLs courtesy of Perl.

Some old draft, now published

* The skeptics case? [2012]
* Time considered as a helix of semi precious stoats [2011]
* Sunday misc [2011]
* Whats going to kill us all? [2008]

The export / import process

Email from Sb said “To export your blog, go to your Dashboard and then Tools –> Export. “All Content” should be selected. When you click the download button, your exported content will be written to an XML file. You can then import the file on a new site via Dashboard –> Tools –> Import.”

That’s true as far as it goes.

Missing: WP won’t import a large blog all at once. You’ll need to split it up. I found year-by-year worked best; anything much larger and WP got Sad.

Missing: you may want to rework internal links within your old blog. I found:

perl -i -pe "s/http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/stoat/https:\/\/wmconnolley.wordpress.com/g"

works for me. Possibly-arguably those links should have been written as relative in the first place; but they weren’t.

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