Wa-hoo! Thanks to Jason J. Thomas at Baltimore Mick, Polizeros has now imported all 6,000+ entries from the old Radio Userland blog into this WordPress blog. Now they are all easily accessible and searchable.

Jason posted a comment here saying he’d recently converted too, and on his blog, details how he did it. It worked perfectly. Thanks Jason!

Here’s what you do

1) Get the Exporter Tool for Radio Userland. This exports Radio posts into a text file importable into Movable Type. Drop it in the Tools folder in Radio, then start Radio and use the Exporter tool. Update: 3/23/06. You can also download the Exporter Tool from my business website.

2) Import that text file into WordPress using these WordPress docs that detail how to import from Movable Type to WordPress. Update: 02/01/06.WordPress 2.0 has import built-in, thus simplifying the process even more.

Ah, but some geeks may ask, what about the Radio absolute paths? Doesn’t that results in broken image links? Yes, it does. But I figured a way around that.

I published my entire Radio blog to an archive folder here. Than I realized that any post with an image in it that had been uploaded to Radio now had a broken link. To fix this you’ll have to manually edit all the posts, yes I know, a massive pain. It took me twelve hours. BUT, once that is done, steps 1) and 2) above will work perfectly.

If you start a new WordPress blog at a new URL and can leave the Radio blog where it is on the original website, then no editing is needed, just do 1) and 2)

That’s it! A bit convoluted, but certainly doable.

Update: 12/03/05. I may have solved the broken images problem. Radio keeps all uploaded images in subfolders under .\images. So, just copy the entire .\images and subfolders to wherever the WordPress blog will be. Then do the import as detailed above. The paths to the images should be fine with no manual tweaking needed.

Tag: WordPress Tag: Radio Userland