Monkeytreats

Argh, revisited

So this theme does, in fact, have archive links, they’re just commented out by default. Fair enough. Things are better now.

The weird thing about jumping from one blog package to another, to another, to another, is that…you’d expect that they’d all be pretty similar, right? I mean the function they’re fulfilling is basically the same, the data they’re storing is roughly the same, etc. And that’s mostly true.

The subtle differences when moving from one to another, though, almost make it more annoying than if you had to roll up your sleeves and migrate all your data manually. As it is, you run a migration script, take a quick look at the site using your new software, it looks pretty good, you put it up in production…and then realize that all your archives are gone, because one platform has a “Show archives” checkbox in the admin interface, and the other expects you to uncomment code in the template. Or your tags are screwed up, because one platform expects them to be comma-separated, and one expects comma-and-space-separated. Or one platform has the concept of static pages (for things like About the Author), and one doesn’t.

I suppose I shouldn’t whine about it too much, though. I doubt I would have had as much luck translating a WordPerfect document to Word circa 1990.

In some ways it would be pretty great if there was some kind of open, standard schema for blog data. I mean, if you consider that all this stuff really is designed to be consumed via Atom or RSS, that’s sort of true already. If there was some way you could easily do a full site dump (essentially an RSS feed of all posts, with comments included and properly nested under the appropriate post, and all common metadata like author, publish date, etc. preserved), it would be trivial to move your data from one place to another, and the only annoying bit would be migrating your theme.

The Blogger-to-WordPress migration script I used early on in this tedious saga accomplished the same task, but I assume it first pulled down a feed of all the posts, and then went back and got all the comments per post. That works fine, but it means you have to explicitly write a script to do that kind of migration for each new piece of software.