More on Moving MT to a New Location

Last night I wrote about exporting one blog out of the Blogs at Penn State platform and importing into a commercial (or self hosted) blog environment ... clearly it is really easy, but I didn't think of a couple of things. So today I did the same thing with my Spring 2007 Podcasting Update that I had done in the Blogs at Penn State about a year ago. You can see the whole thing here at this space now by using this link. This time I did three things while moving it:

1. Grabbed all the images it references from my PSU Personal space and uploaded them into my common directory here at this blog. I obviously preserved the names to make it easier. Another thing I do with all my blogs is organize all the media I reference in each post into a common location ... because of this I was able to take the export file and do an easy find and replace with the old path to the new path. Perfect! Now all my posts reference local media files.
2. Next thing I did was create a new category here at Learning & Innovation that I wanted all these posts to show up in -- I chose PSU Podcasting.
3. Again using TextWrangler I did a quick find and replace to set the Primary Category to PSU Podcasting. This brought all my posts in under a common category. I didn't do that on my iPhone blog import and it made me go through and update each by hand ... not too bad, because I only had 20 or so posts, but if it would have been a big blog it would have taken me some time.

I could easily create a script to do that here locally, or by working with someone smarter than myself we could come up with a simple little utility to do it all via the web. All told, it took me under 10 minutes to make it all happen. Seamless move!

Comments

[Joel Galbraith]

Hey Cole,
It was great reading these last two posts as that was indeed one of my barriers to using Blogs at Penn Sate--less so for myself, but recommending it to my students. I assumed is was doable, but felt uneasy not knowing for sure. Thanks for your transparency in this process. Obviously the "seamless" process you describe is relative to one's basic understanding of replacing filepaths, but like you say, a little script to facilitate that would really make it seamless.

Again, nice to see it is both doable and was actually done by our own PSU people! I'd venture to say you'd have posted even if it had been a bear to transfer! and then had your staff start working on a solution. Kudos to you for sharing your experience.
I feel better about sending my students to Blogs at PS knowing their blogs can have a life beyond graduation should they wish them to.
-Joel G.