Wordpress importer for web-log.nl back-ups
Update January 8, 2007: note how this importer is now almost 2 years old. I have no idea if it still works with either web-log.nl or a recent version of WordPress. Use at your own peril!
Original entry: I recently moved this blog from the web-log.nl servers to my own. Although the service at web-log.nl was absolutely fine and I wouldn’t recommend against it (except that it is now owned by Ilse, which is always a bad omen) , I figured that getting them to make the changes I wanted would be more work than adapting a FOSS weblog myself. Since WordPress supported a lot of the things I wanted out of the box, and had a good name, I went with that one.
Moving blogs means losing entries, unless you are willing to copy them by hand or unless you can find a converter. There was no converter for web-log.nl to WordPress, but adapting an existing one for my own purposes proved trivial. Although web-log.nl won’t export the entire database, it will export a “back-up” of all your entries in XML format. You won’t get the comments with that, so if you have a lot of comments, this won’t be a solution for other ‘movers’.
You can find the import script here. i) Rename to exclude the “.txt” extension, ii) make a change in the first lines as indicated, then iii) place it in your wp-admin directory. iv) Run the script from your webbrowser–the rest should be self-explanatory.
Keep in mind that this does not convert all the web-log.nl tags, only the ones I used in my own blog entries (which is a smallish subset of what web-log.nl offered). You will probably have to revisit all your entries once imported and make some adjustments. You will also need to re-categorise your entries, as category information is not (yet) exported.
One further warning: I wrote it, I ran it, it worked. For me. It may not work for you. It may eat your computer. It may eat your children’s first-born children to the tenth generation. If you want to feel a little safer, there are three things you can do: 1) read the plain text in the script (or the code, if you can) to see what it does. 2) In a copy of the script, change the lines that are responsible for writing to the database to lines that will output to the webbrowser (if you know how to). If something goes wrong, you will see it there. 3) Only run this script on a fresh WordPress installation, so that if you corrupt the database, you won’t lose existing entries.
This script is licensed under the GNU GPL and may be freely copied and distributed as long as you stick to the terms of the license.
Cool! (And scary!) The Pivot people have used some of my code for their Web-log.nl-importer. Most of the code they borrowed as mine actually came from other scripts, but the web-log.nl specific stuff (the conversion from BBcode type mark-up to HTML) is mine, all mine! (Preciousssss.)