Porting my MoveableType data to Pebble

An article by Glen    No Comments

I’ve just spent the arvo moving my data over from MoveableType to Pebble, and after some gotchas it should all be good.

I took a longer route than most since I had to go via phpMyAdmin to get an XML dump of my MT data first (since I don’t have shell access to the mysql box, and I can’t get to it from remote hosts).

The basic operation was:

• Work out the naming of Pebble entries (all good, turns out to be a simple Calendar.getTimeInMillis() deal)
• Work out the file format of Pebble entries (only two gotchas here – some custom formatting of Date entries which can be handled by SimpleDateFormat, and the CDATA sections in blog comments – where MT used PCDATA here. There were also some issues in swapping MT cr/lfs with first class br elements, but that’s another story).
• Write some XML Pull to make the glue happen.
• I also learned about File.makeDirs() which turns out to be a very useful little comment for making all required parent directories to a particular location. Useful, say, if you need to create /2004/06/13/ in a directory tree. BTW, took me a while to work out the “06″ story, and not “6″ which causes all sorts of pebble issues when trying to browse to a particular entry.

So I have to say it again, XML Pull Parsers are very, very handy for hacking together some parsing code. The XML stuff was the easiest part of the port – which was not always the case for me in the past. And, of course, Pebble – just rocks.