Saturday, February 02, 2008

Migration


Most of the people I know have LiveJournal accounts but since 2004 I have had my stuff on Blogger. With all the action happening at one place, I was being left out on what was increasingly the frontier of Outer Blogistan. Thus began my search for a way to migrate from Blogger to LiveJournal. Now, I simply could have created an account and started blogging but that would leave four years of posts somewhere else. I would need to find a way to copy all of my posts from the one to the other.

For that, I found Blog2Blog, a terrific little application that will take all of the postings from one and copying it into the other. The problem was, for whatever reason it didn't work for me. It would get 500 postings into my 600 posting archive and fail with an error; "Unable to Fetch All Entries." I installed it on another machine and had the exact same error in the exact same place which meant that there was something on one of my postings that was conflicting with the software.

I contacted the author and he was able to very quickly find a bug. Two weeks later he set me up with a new version of the software and it worked. Mostly.

The first time I tried uploading the postings to LiveJournal, it stopped mid-way through with an error. I thought it was more a conflict with something else my pc was doing at the time so I ran it again and it completed without issue.

Except that I now had about a year of double-posting. I've had to sort through and delete a bunch of entries. I also need to go through and do some other edits (such as tags, which didn't migrate) and figure out how to change some layout things but, essentially, I am now on LiveJournal.