Converting from Radio Userland to WordPress

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

19 Comments

  1. That’s great news, Bob. I looked at the master document that someone created for Converting from Radio Userland to WordPress, and it annoyed me. I appreciate the author writing it up, but if you were coming from Windows, you were sort of stuck after the first step. I did some poking around, and I found the Exporter.root tool to convert it to MT.

    After that, it was simple to convert the blog thanks to the import-mt.php script that WordPress includes. Of course, I did not have the images you had, but since you already put in those 12 hours of hard work, it worked out pretty well.

    Now, to work on my next project: comments.

  2. Are your comments in Radio or in Haloscan? Mine were in Haloscan, which can be exported to text. But I’m not sure how to then import them…

  3. Methinks I am going to give up on comment importing, especially since my comments are still hosted via Radio Userland. I cannot find anything on how to do this. In theory, you could do the import-RSS.php script, but that means trying to find a way to RSS-ify your comments.

    Not a huge loss, but it would have been nice. Besides, it’s too darn late on the East Coast. 😉

  5. Hi .. this is a brilliant find. Thanks for sharing how to transfer a Radio Blog to WP – i have wanted to do this for ever so long and just didn’t have the guts to experiment with it. This makes it simple. I’m not done yet, but i have managed to transfer all my posts to a Movable Type Blog – it was easy, following your instructions. I’m now wondering if there is any way of exporting comments and trackbacks as well?

  6. There’s no way I’ve found to import comments from Radio to WP. Especially in the comments were in Haloscan, but even in native Radio. I’m sure a script could be written, but haven’t seen one.

    Once you’re in MT, the comments import is one click from the WP dashboard.

  8. Aloha all. I’ve been trying to get this tool for a while, but the ideaspace.net site has not been responsive. Is there anyone who has it that would be willing to email me a copy? keola at nahenahe dot net.

    Mahalo nui (many thanks).

    Keola

  11. […] Six Apart could be in danger of what happened to Radio UserLand – a once cutting edge blogging platform got long in the teeth and users migrated elsewhere. I know I did. My political blog, Politics in the Zeros, started out as a Radio blog. But there were odd bugs, and declining amounts of tech support, plus other platforms had more features. (BTW, the conversion from Radio to WordPress, once I figured out how, was quick and easy.) […]

  14. thank you for the tool and information, I just learned that Radio userland is shutting down, this will immensely help me move my blog to a new home

  15. Another vote of thanks. This tool made my combined move and transition smooth as silk.

    By the way, I handled the images this way:

    1. FTP’d the entire radio image folder to the new server. Put it in a folder called “oldblog” at the root level (could be called anything).

    2. After exporting the blog posts to MT text file, opened that large text file in a text editor (I used BBEdit) and did a global search and replace: find [img src=”http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/images] replace with [img src=”http://www.drugwarrant.com/oldblog/images]

    Then I went ahead and imported it into WordPress. All the images for 3,500+ posts were perfect.

    Thanks again.

    – Pete

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