INSTRUCTIONS FOR IMPORTING BLOGGER POSTS TO ONE OF DEAN ESMAY’S NEW SPONSORED BLOGS ON VERVE:

EXHAUSTIVE INSTRUCTIONS FOR IMPORTING BLOGGER POSTS TO ONE OF DEAN ESMAY’S NEW SPONSORED Movable Type BLOGS HOSTED ON VERVE:

This may be an inelegant and “brute force” way of doing this. There may be many “cooler” ways of doing it. But this way is simple and straightforward and, for people like me who have no prior experience hosting their own websites and transferring things via FTP, it is as simple and understandable as possible. Just follow these steps:

1) Use Blogger to edit the Template of your old Blog*Spot blog. The first thing you want to do is make a backup copy of all the text in your template, because you are about to overwrite it and you will want to restore it later. Put the mouse in the Template window, hit “ctrl-a” to select all the text, and “ctrl-c” to copy it to the clipboard. Now open your favorite text editor (not a word processor like Word or WordPerfect, but a text editor like Windows Notepad or Wordpad), paste all that text into a new blank document (“ctrl-v” will paste it), and save that document as a “.txt” text document somewhere on your computer’s hard drive where you will be able to find it later. [I created a new root directory called “blog conversion” and saved it there as “original template.txt”, but you can do whatever. Your desktop would work fine as a temporary space.]

2) Go back to editing the Template of your old Blog*Spot blog. Select all of your template text (that you just backed up) and delete it. Bye-Bye. Your Template should now be entirely empty and blank.

3) Copy the following into your now-blank Template:

AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>

DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>

-----

BODY:

<$BlogItemBody$>

--------

</Blogger>

The above text should be the only thing in your Template.

[Note: If you use “Blogger Pro” and not just plain Blogger, add this line before the “AUTHOR:” line above:

TITLE: <PostSubject><$BlogItemSubject$></PostSubject>

If you do NOT use “Blogger Pro,” do not add this line.]

4) Press the “Save Changes” button in Blogger.

5) Go to the “Settings” area in Blogger. Print a copy of this screen (or write the settings down) so you will have a record of what the settings were originally. You are about to change them, and you’ll need to change them back later.

6) Under “Formatting”, it says “Show XX days’ posts on main page.” Set the number “XX” to some number larger than the number of days since you began Blogging. If you started a year ago, set it to at least 365. If two years ago, set it to at least 730, etc. This will cause all of your posts to appear on the main page of your blog, no matter how old, thus eliminating complications with posts that might otherwise appear only on your archive pages.

7) Set the “Date/Time Format” so that it looks like MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS AM|PM.

8) Set “Convert Line Breaks” to “No.”

9) Set “Archive Frequency” to “No Archive.”

10) Return to the “Posts” screen in Blogger, and Publish your weblog. [This will cause your cherished blog to go live on the internet in what appears to be a totally unformatted gobbledygook of raw data. The good news is, that is the format Movable Type wants to read. The other good news is, in less than five minutes, you can restore your Blog to the way it is supposed to look. (If any of your readers see your naked site in these five short minutes, they’ll probably forgive you.) There is no bad news.]

11) Go view your old Blog*Spot blog live on the internet, in all its newfound raw ugliness.

11.1) In Internet Explorer (any Netscape users will have to improvise), go to the VIEW menu. Select “Source.”

11.2) It will probably tell you that the file is too big for NotePad. That’s fine. Open it in WordPad or some other text editor (preferably not a word processor like Microsoft Word or Wordperfect).

12) What you will see is even uglier than your cherished blog currently is, because it is your ugly blog viewed in raw HTML code. This is what Movable Type wants to import.

13) Save this document somewhere where you will be able to find again it on your computer’s hard drive as MTimport.txt. Make sure it is saved as a TEXT file with the file extension .TXT

14) You have just, in effect, “taken a picture” of your old Blogger blog in the format in which Movable Type is best able to read it. You have saved that picture on your computer in the file MTimport.txt. You are now officially done with Blogger.

15) [If you want, you can now go back to Blogger. Restore the “Settings” to what they were before you just changed them. Open the copy of your original Template that you saved in Step 1 above. Paste that file’s contents back into your Template to restore it to the way it was before we started. Republish your Blogger blog. Everything should now be back to normal for your regular readers. No harm, no foul.]

16) Now you need to tell MT about the picture you have just taken of your old Blogger blog, so MT can read it and import your old posts from it.

17) Go to the “control panel” of the new website that you created on Verve and emailed to Dean. Using the name you told Verve to give to your website in place of “[mysite]” below, you can access your control panel at:

http://www.[mysite].com/cpanel

You may need to enter the account name and password Verve or Dean emailed you.

18) Once in the control panel, click on the icon for File Manager.

19) In the File Manager, change to the directory “/public_html”

20) Change again to the directory “cgi-bin”

21) Change again to the directory “mt”. You should now be in “/public_html/cgi-bin/mt”

(The file “mt.cgi” should be in the same directory you are in.)

22) If there is a directory named “import” (the lower-case “i” is important) change to it. If there is not, create one, and then change to it.

23) Click on “Upload Files.” Browse your computer’s hard drive to locate the MTimport.txt file you just created. Once you have it located and selected, click “Upload”.

24) Now the “picture” of your old Blogger blog that we just took is in a place where MT can find it and read it. Capiche?

25) Open the Movable Type interface. It should be:

http://www.[mysite].com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi

You may again have to provide usernames and passwords provided by either you to Dean or Dean to you.

26) Select the weblog you wish to add the posts to (presumably, the one you told Dean to create for you).

27) Select “import/export” from the menu on the left.

28) CHECK the box “Import entries as me” [note: this assumes that you are a single-author blogger. If you have multiple authors of different posts and want to preserve that information, it is do-able, but you are on your own as to how to do it.]

29) Leave the “default category” thing alone.

30) CHANGE “default post status for entries” to PUBLISH.

31) The next two boxes concern “Titles” for each of your posts, which MT recognizes, but Blogger does not. Here are the options for dealing with these two boxes:

IF you use Blogger Pro, leave them blank. Your posts’ titles will import automatically. You may stop reading this instruction now.

IF you never attempted to create or distinguish any text as a “title” to each of your posts in Blogger, leave these boxes blank. MT will automatically adopt the first five words of each of your Blogger post as the “Title” of the new post in MT. This can be awkward, but MT expects each post to have a title, and it has to do something.

IF you have consistently tried to use titles for all of your posts, and have consistently used HTML codes to differentiate the titles from the rest of the text, you are in luck.

For example, on my old blog (www.weirdofthenews.blogspot.com), I used the first line of each of my posts as a “title” and made it boldfaced by starting it with and ending it with .

I was able to use the two MT boxes we are discussing to automatically preserve all of my posts’ titles by telling it to look for as the “Start title HTML” and to look for as the “End title HTML”. It worked beautifully. (And even though I also used and elsewhere in my posts, MT is smart enough to ignore the uses that come after the beginning of each post.)

So if you distinguished a “title” for each of your posts in Blogger by giving it a different font or typeface using HTML codes, you can enter those same HTML codes into these two boxes and have MT automatically parse out your titles for each post.

If you did not attempt to distinguish any “titles” from regular text by some HTML code in Blogger, you are out of luck, and each of your post’s titles will just be the first five words of your post on MT. Just leave the two boxes blank.

32) Take a deep breath, and click on “Import Entries.” If all is successful, you’ll see the screen scrolling entries for each one of your old posts as it is imported into the MT system. If not, you’re back to square one.

33) IF SUCCESSFUL, make sure to use the Control Panel to go back to the “import” directory above and DELETE the MTimport.txt file. If you don’t, if you ever tell MT to import something again it will re-import all of the posts in MTimport.txt again, leaving you with duplicate posts on your new weblog.

GOOD LUCK!!

And many thanks to Dean!!!