Shahzad Bhatti Welcome to my ramblings and rants!

Moving my Blog from Blojsom to WordPress

I recently changed my ISP from my old friend Aligen (courtesy of Farrad Ali for providing free access since ’98) to HostMonster. So, instead of running my own Tomcat now I am relying on PHP and Rails. The next thing was how do I move my blogs and preserve the dates. Blojsom was simple file based software, but WordPress uses mysql. So I wrote a simple ruby script to convert it.

The first thing I did was to download dbi from

http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-dbi/

I then uncompressed it

		tar xzf dbi-0.1.1.tar.gz

Then

cd ~/ruby-dbi

Since, I don’t have root access on my host, I could not install it to the /usr/bin directory. So I created my own ruby directory

mkdir ~/ruby

and then ran config with my own bin directory as

ruby setup.rb config –bin-dir=~/bin –with=dbi,dbd_mysql –rb-dir=~/ruby –so-dir=~/ruby

Next I ran
ruby setup.rb setup

and then

ruby setup.rb install

Now then fun part, following is a ruby script that reads my flat files and inserts them into wordpress database:

 1 #!/usr/bin/ruby
 2 require 'dbi'
 3 
 4 #
 5 ### import blogs from old blog directory to wordpress
 6 #
 7 class ImportBlogs
 8   def initialize(webapp_dir)
 9     @webapp_dir = webapp_dir
10   end
11 
12   def delete_all
13     DBI.connect('DBI:Mysql:weblog', 'weblog', '*****') do | dbh |
14       dbh.do('delete from wp_posts where id > 2')
15     end
16   end
17 
18   def add_all
19     files = Dir.glob("#{@webapp_dir}/*").delete_if { |f| File.directory?(f) }
20     DBI.connect('DBI:Mysql:weblog', 'weblog', '*****') do | dbh |
21       id = 3
22       post_author = 1
23       sql = "insert into wp_posts(post_author, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_content, post_title, post_category, post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified, post_modified_gmt, guid) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)"
24       dbh.prepare(sql) do | sth |
25         files.each do |f|
26           lines = nil
27           File.open(f, "r") do |file|
28             lines = file.readlines
29           end
30           post_content = lines.join(' ')
31           post_title = lines[0]
32           post_excerpt = post_content.slice(0,255)
33           post_date = post_date_gmt = post_modified = post_modified_gmt = File.new(f).mtime
34           post_category = 3
35           post_name = File.basename(f)
36           guid = "http://weblog.plexobject.com/?p=#{id}"
37           puts "Adding #{f} mtime #{post_date}"
38           sth.execute(post_author, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_content, post_title, post_category, post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified, post_modified_gmt, guid)
39           id += 1
40         end
41       end
42     end
43   end
44 end
45 
46 ib = ImportBlogs.new('~/webapps/blojsom/computing')
47 ib.delete_all
48 ib.add_all
49 
50 

Finally, I ran it as follows:
ruby -I /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 -I /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib -I ~/ruby -I ~/ruby/DBD -I ~/ruby/dbi -I ~/ruby/DBD/Mysql import_blogs.rb
Voilla, I got everything as expected.