How can I get my old, dead blog on paper?

June 13, 2006 3:01 PM

I had a blog for many years that I let wither on the vine. I no longer have the site, but I *do* have an export of my Movable Type entries. Is there any way to get this printed ? Any companies that will work with a file? Other blogging tools that take MT exports that will produce a printable version ? I'll settle for any solution, from a bound book to straight-up printable pdf.
posted by duckus to computers & internet (12 comments total)

I Googled "blog to book" and got this link. I'm sure there must be others like it. If you can at least temporarily reinstall MT and import your entries, this might be a solution.
posted by Robot Johnny at 3:04 PM on June 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

I'd just get a new MT or other MT-importing blog somewhere, upload your entries, view a page displaying all entries (you may need a template for that), then copy and paste into Word or print to a PDF.

Much easier than faffing around with blog to book companies, or somesuch thing.
posted by armoured-ant at 3:10 PM on June 13, 2006

My laziness is precluding me from reinstalling MT somewhere. That will be my last resort. I am hoping for some kind of automated solution that will work with what I have now ..

Well actually, the last-last resort would be to just print out the text file I have, but it's looooooong. No page breaks .. I'd like something a little prettier if I can.
posted by duckus at 3:24 PM on June 13, 2006

duckus--

A lot of web hosts have one-click install for Wordpress, which has one-click import for Movable Type. So it wouldn't be too hard. If you have any friends with any kind of web-hosting accounts, you might ask them to do this.
posted by adamrice at 3:34 PM on June 13, 2006

ExpressionEngine can import Moveable Type entries. You can try a free hosted demo or download the free version.

You can also import into WordPress.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:38 PM on June 13, 2006

The best way I've found to print out well-formatted text is LaTeX. Do a find/replace for the bits that indicate titles etc and change them to LaTeX section headers. You'll get a well-typset PDF at the end.
posted by bonaldi at 5:16 PM on June 13, 2006

Going through the file and transforming it into something else is essentially a trivial task for a number of computer languages. Perl for instance, which is what MT would use to import it anyway. But importing it into MT would mean splitting up your one file into many.

Or you could also just open it in Word and fix it up with Find and Replace -- if it's huge, you could do it with a macro someone here could definitely write for you.

If you can specify exactly what you want the output to be, it shouldn't be a big deal. One long file? Each post with a page-break after it? HTML converted into the correct bold, italic, etc? Are there images involved?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 6:14 PM on June 13, 2006

xamp-lite (apache-mysql-php) has virtually no install process (simply unzip to a directory). I don't know about MT, but Wordpress and Textpattern can both be installed in less than 5-minutes, both can import from MT, and both can (probably) be configured to output however you like.
posted by unmake at 6:26 PM on June 13, 2006

Blurb is an option.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:43 PM on June 13, 2006

I'd be happy to take your MT export and dump it into either my MT install or a Wordpress install so you can do one of those blog-to-book services. It wouldn't take me more than five minutes.
posted by dmd at 5:51 AM on June 14, 2006

I did this a year or so ago - The export file is just one huge, long text document. I just ran a bunch of find/replace searches and got rid of all the weird formatting - then I just pasted it into a word document and did some final touch-ups. Cafe press can print it up after that.
posted by soplerfo at 6:15 AM on June 14, 2006

Last night I bit the bullet and threw MT on my mac. My blog has been resurrected .. now I can either get a temporary domain name for a blog to book service, or create a printable index page.

Thanks all ..
posted by duckus at 8:55 AM on June 14, 2006