How and how much to transfer to a new platform?

April 30, 2007 11:23 AM

I've been running my blog for many years now and it's come to my attention that I'm dead without an RSS feed. I've used Dreamweaver to design and edit the site all these years and have tried to figure out ways to incorporate an RSS feed when I update, but I haven't found an easy way to do that thus far (XO is my host.) I may be wrong but I think I need to just transfer the whole thing to a new platform like Moveable Type or something like that--is it just easiest to hire someone to do this for me? How would I go about this and how much would it cost? Or are there better ways to do this? Help!
posted by clairezulkey to computers & internet (10 comments total)

RSS is just an xml file. Just add a line to the file every time you make an entry in the blog.
posted by DU at 11:34 AM on April 30, 2007

If you've been doing your blog by hand, you're going to have a real problem migrating to MT. What are you currently using? Most packages have X->Y conversion tools out there.

BTW- Self-linking here is a big no-no. Doubly so malformed self-links.
posted by mkultra at 11:47 AM on April 30, 2007

[removed link to your blog, put it in your profile if you want people to check it out]
posted by jessamyn at 11:48 AM on April 30, 2007

Dreamweaver has lots of extensions that people have written to, well, extend it's features.

A google search for dreamweaver rss extension returns some possibilities. They might not necessarily be free tho . . .
posted by jeremias at 11:50 AM on April 30, 2007

Switching to a new platform is one possibility; it would be a major piece of work and a major change to the way you update your blog, but it would pay off in reduced effort in the future, especially since you wouldn't have to update the monthly and other pages yourself.

If you want to postpone or avoid that, a program could examine ("scrape") your existing content and produce an RSS feed based on that. It looks like your file naming and page formatting is pretty consistent, so that wouldn't be that hard to do. Screen-scraping is one of my idle, geeky pleasures, so I will do this very thing for you later today, if you like.
posted by pocams at 11:52 AM on April 30, 2007

wow, thanks pocams--what are some programs that do that?

I may have found a friend who is willing to do the transfer over to MT for me, although I'll see.

(sorry jessamyn--I wasn't trying to promote my site, just giving people reading the question an idea of what the site looks like in case it helped with my question).
posted by clairezulkey at 12:08 PM on April 30, 2007

I don't know of any programs that will do screen-scraping for you; basically, it's a matter of analyzing the HTML and writing a program using an existing scraping toolkit, usually in a language like Python or Ruby. (I would use Python with the BeautifulSoup and PyRSS2Gen libraries, or perhaps ScrapeNFeed.) Typically a fairly small amount of programming is required, but it really is programming as opposed to using an existing tool.
posted by pocams at 1:04 PM on April 30, 2007

Pretty much this exact same thing has come up in the green before. RSS is really only important for new posts. Your old posts really don't belong in an RSS feed.

One approach you can take is to set up Wordpress or movable type to use for future posts. You can customize the template so that it matches your old posts (or vice versa). A little hacking at the navigation and archive UI and it may be completely hidden (other than the URLs) that your old archived posts and the archives generated by the new system are separate entities.
posted by Good Brain at 1:22 PM on April 30, 2007

Hi Claire, I work with the MT team -- if you decide a tool like that is right for you, I can help you with the migration, and recent versions of Dreamweaver even let you make MT templates (designs) right inside the tool, so you might be able to keep your current look. Ping me at [e-mail] if you want a hand. I just hope you keep blogging. :)
posted by anildash at 3:23 PM on April 30, 2007

thanks so much! Will do
posted by clairezulkey at 8:34 AM on May 1, 2007