Importing old posts

I’ve been writing blog posts (of varying quality) since 2006. One of the things that I always dread about moving blog platforms is the export and import process. This morning I managed to get all the blog posts across surprisingly quickly.

The last system I was using that the posts existed in was a simple MySQL database (simple because I built it quickly in 2010). I still haven’t turned off my old hosting which provides a PHP MySQL interface so I able to export all that history to a JSON file in one click.

A few lines of Python later and there is a simple method of opening up the JSON file and outputting a new MarkDown file for each blog post complete with Front Matter. The Gist is on Github.

The other thing I dread about moving platforms is the words in those old posts… Each time I flick back through the older posts, I remember that I really don’t recommend reading the blog posts pre 2010… I mean, teenage me had far too much time on his hands, and decided to use that to write mostly drivel…

Currently reading through blog posts I wrote when I was 16… Blegh. Trying to work out if I want to put them back online for the history of it all…

— James Doc (@jamesdoc) 1 September 2018

But, it feels wrong to just delete them. So they are there. For the histories. It made sense to include a health warning at the top of those posts so I’ve added a new filter my 11ty config to warn people if they stumble upon them:

eleventyConfig.addFilter("dateComparison", (dateObj, compareWith)=> {
  return DateTime.fromJSDate(dateObj) < DateTime.fromISO(compareWith)
})

You can see it being used in my post template file.