Thinga2MT

As mentioned earlier today, I completed a tool tonight that you can use to migrate your Thingamablog database to any blog service that understands the Movable Type import interface.  Although I noticed a couple of unexpected conditions in the export/import process (notably, that the category names changed to "null" along the way), it's mostly good, so I'm gonna toss it up on the site in case anyone else needs something like this.
If you do happen to use Thinga2MT, please let me know how it worked for you.

Other minor comments:

• Thingamablog makes no distinction between primary and non-primary categories.  They're just a big list as far as it's concerned.  In this code, I just take advantage of the fact that the movable type import format recognizes the first secondary category seen as the primary category if none is specified.  Thus, it suffices to output a simple list of categories.
• For the time being, I'm using a simple database-only approach to the conversion.  In particular, I'm extracting the blog keys from the authors table and then enumerating over that to generate the entries.
• This extract is about the substance of the posts, not the templates and style of the site.  If you're extracting to MT/TypePad/friends, I assume you're also prepared to embark on a pretty major site redesign.
• The MT import format does not specify what timezone to use, so your blogs may be skewed by up to 23 hours.

Here's a link to the source for Thinga2MT.  To use this, you'll also need the hsqldb.jar file from the HSQL DB people.

Update: I had accidentally cut-n-pasted over some of the code.  Fixed and uploaded.

Comments

[travelsnow]

Does this work for Wordpress or Wordpress MU? I want to export from TAMB to one of these.