Importing old posts

Saturday, 1 September 2018

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.

import json
import os
with open('oldblog.json') as f:
data = json.load(f)
sorted_pages = sorted(data, key=lambda k: int(k['id']))
posts = (x for x in sorted_pages if x['page_status'] in 'published')
for post in posts:
print post['id'] + " " + post['page_title']
filename = "blog/%s/%s.md" % (post['page_datetime'][:4], post['page_url'])
if not os.path.exists(os.path.dirname(filename)):
os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(filename))
file = open(filename,"w")
file.write("---\n")
file.write("title: %s\n" % post['page_title'].replace(':','-').encode('utf-8', 'ignore'))
file.write("type: article" + "\n")
file.write("tags: %s\n" % post['page_category'])
file.write("date: %s\n" % post['page_datetime'])
if post['page_header_image']:
headImage = post['page_header_image'].replace('/assets/uploads/', '/_assets/img/blog/imported/')
file.write("leadImage: %s\n" % headImage)
file.write("---\n")
file.write("%s\n" % post['page_content'].encode('utf-8', 'ignore'))
file.close()
view raw blog-to-markdown.py hosted with ❤ by 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…

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.

Post changelog

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