Day: January 16, 2007

I’ve been intending to convert my blog from Geeklog to WordPress for probably the better part of a year.  I’m a stickler for preventing dataloss though, and I really wanted to keep all my old blog posts.  I searched the web on and off for a month or two looking for a way to convert the data, and the best I could find was the RSS import in WordPress.  Unfortunately, the RSS export in Geeklog sucks rocks, and even hacking on it a bit, I couldn’t get all the data out in one piece.

So I finally gave up searching and wrote my own WordPress import module for Geeklog that would copy and translate the data directly from one database to the other. It’s heavily based on the existing importer for TextPattern that’s included with the current WordPress distributions.  It imports categories, users, posts, and comments.  It also stores the Geeklog Story ID (sid) into the post metadata, for use in making the old permalinks keep working.  I have an article.php stub you can drop into your wordpress directory that takes the Geeklog permalinks and redirects to the new WordPress ones.

I’m posting this here so the next person who has to convert a Geeklog to a WordPress can save themselves a bunch of trouble. :)  It’s all been posted to WordPress’ Trac system.  If you make use of it and make any improvements to it while you’re at it, feel free to add them to that bug.

So I finally managed to get my blog converted to WordPress. 🙂

It’s much easier to post here than it was to Geeklog (what I was using before), which means I should be posting more frequently now. I have it set up so the feed URLs and the permalinks from the old blog should redirect to the new permalinks, so hopefully nothing was lost.

I may screw with the theme a bit before it settles down, so if you’re reading this in a web browser, don’t be surprised if the look changes when you come back 🙂