I finally got the import-mt.php import file that comes with the default WordPress installation to work. Whew! What a long and hard ride, but I learned a lot and I hope you will find some lessons here, too.
Some of the following information might be a little redundant, but if you are finding this page first, and not reading through all my previous attempts YET, then this article will be of more value than the others. I do recommend you take a peek at them as you will learn a whole lot about this process.
The magic of making the import for MoveableType work for static HTML pages having consistent formatting on every page. On my original pages, every title was in an H2 heading which is never used elsewhere on the page. The author is also in a unique div, as is the content and footer, and so on. The more uniform your page’s code layout, the easier this process will be.
First, copy your HTML code to a text editor. If you use Word or WordPerfect or other word-processing program, you are asking for mistakes unless you are an expert at tweaking that program so it will not convert quote marks or hyphens into character codes, will not screw up your html tags, and – well, if you know what I’m talking about, you can use a word processor. If you don’t – don’t use one. Trust me. You are only asking for totally borked code. So get a powerful text or html editor and you are good to go.
The only criteria, and this makes things a little more difficult, is that the program should have extensive search and replace capabilities, specifically searching and replacing multiple lines of text.
During this process, we recommend you make many backups along the way for you will make mistakes. It’s part of the process. Make many and frequent backups. Name the backups by the date and time so you can easily go back to the most recent one if you make a mistake.
During the extensive search and replace process to turn your html document into the form needed for the import-mt, your goal is to emulate the following example of the end result you need in order to import your data using this import technique that emulates the MoveableType import/export format. The information MUST BE IN THIS EXACT ORDER AND LAYOUT.
--------
AUTHOR: Author Name
TITLE: Title of the Post or Article
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 0
CONVERT BREAKS: 0
ALLOW PINGS: 0
PRIMARY CATEGORY: Home
CATEGORY: About
DATE: 7/10/2000 03:10:03 PM
-----
BODY:
<Article text is here with html and all kinds of information including <i class="red">html using quotes</i> lots of lists and other information....on and on to the end.</p>
-----
EXTENDED BODY:
A rattling on of the article information.
-----
EXCERPT:
A summary of the information which is about nothing important.
-----
KEYWORDS:
fred, sally, nothing, important, but keywords, here
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: ben
EMAIL: something@something.org
IP: 123-45-6789
URL: http://www.asite.com
DATE: 10/07/2002 06:58:26 PM
So...How did you do?
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: fred smith
EMAIL: somethingelse@something.org
IP: 123-45-6789
URL: http://www.asite.com
DATE: 10/08/2002 08:58:34 AM
Comment here that rattles on about something important.
-----
--------
AUTHOR: Silly Person
TITLE: Some Fascinating Idea
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 2
CONVERT BREAKS: 0
ALLOW PINGS: 0
PRIMARY CATEGORY:
DATE: 10/05/2002 03:10:03 PM
-----
BODY:
.....and it continues on.
Begin The Process
Copy each html page into the editor and put an 8 dashed line (——–) in between each html page, taking advantage of the doctype or <html> that begins every web page to use for your search and replace. This dashed line is the divider between your “records” (individual web pages).
Now, we are going to use that 8 dash line as our starting point for the next search and replace sequence. Search for the 8 dashes followed by a hard return (line break):
——–
and replace it with the 8 dashes, the hard return (line break) and the following:
--------
AUTHOR: Author Name
TITLE: Title of the Post or Article
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 2
CONVERT BREAKS: 0
ALLOW PINGS: 0
PRIMARY CATEGORY: Home
DATE: 7/10/2000 03:10:03 PM
-----
BODY:
Between BODY and the line above is a five dash line (—–). This is the separator between fields.
Adjust the information to your needs. Some of this information may need to be individually searched and replaced. For example, my articles have the author name in a unique DIV, so I searched and replaced:
<div id=author>Author Name</div>
with:
AUTHOR: Author Name
Replacing “Author Name” with the correct name.
At the end of the post, before comments and other information, at the end of the post information, search and replace the post ending code with a five dash line. For example, I had a DIV that states:
<div id="next"><p><a title="next article in the series href="article42.html">Next Article: Article Name 42</a></p></div>
This is consistent (with a different file name) at the end of every article, so I could easily replace:
<div id="next">
with the 5 dash line as the field separator:
-----
Now, you will have a lot of excessive information still left in your file, meta tags, sidebar information, CSS, and other lines of code that you won’t need any more. If they are consistent, search and replace to get rid of them. If they aren’t, get rid of as much as you can and then you will have to clean up the rest manually.
HTML Meets XHTML
To make sure that everything is XML compliant and ready for WordPress, I went through and checked all the code. Here are a list of my search and replaces:
<hr> --> <hr /><br> --< <br />- Curly Quotes to text quotes (no character codes only quote marks)
- Curly Apostrophes to plain apostrophes (no character codes only apostrophes)
[hyphen] --> -(hard encoded dash – usually formed by holding down the Cntrl+hyphen key)- Double Blank Lines
-->Single Blank Lines imgtag endings from">to" />(inspect each one before changing as">is found on hyperlinks)
These are the most common. Your html code may be different, so either have it converted using special software or manually inspect for your own needs.
Manually Check the Data
Besides checking for XML and non-friendly WordPress characters, I go through the data and clean up things that either might mess up the import, or that just need cleaning.
For instance, occasionally I would break a title into two lines with a line break. This won’t work, so I manually had to go through and clean those out. I sometimes also use ID in the DIV such as <h2 id=”information”> which would be missed in a simple <h2> search and replace. This has to be caught and corrected.
Other code, tags, and information that didn’t belong any more, and that wasn’t consistent across multiple pages, had to be deleted. This is time consuming, but it has to be removed.
When you think you have it all cleaned up, you probably don’t. Go through every bit of data and double check it. As you go, you will need to fill in the “missing” information from your earlier search and replaces. Check the following:
- Author
- Enter the name(s) of the article or post author(s). If these names deviate in any way from the spelling of the WordPress administrator, new Author User Profiles will be created and the maximum permission level these users will have is 9. By ignorance, I set my User Profile name to be “Lorelle” and yet my import listed “Lorelle VanFossen”. “Lorelle” has level 10 top administrator status, but “Lorelle VanFossen” is stuck at user level 9. Do check your name carefully if you are the only author so your posts will be put into the administrator’s name.
- Title
- Add the title for each article or post. < a title="article about the compromises made by switching to WordPress" href="index.php?p=588">Think about the post title as you add it. If you choose to use permalinks, these will become the new link titles for your post. If your title was “Another Day at the Office” the permalink would become:
http://example.com/another-day-at-the-officeIf this is the point of the post, leave it. If the story of the post is about the copy machine breaking down and your attempts to confront its innards results in a burst of toner that covers you from head to toe and the panic that followed, maybe the title should be more fitting and be “Assaulted by Copier” or something more memorable.
- STATUS
- You have two choices for your post status: publish or draft. If ”’draft”’ is chosen, the post will be added to your draft post list and you can access and edit it from the Write Post screen from a link below the menu tabs. If you choose ”’publish”’ the post will be immediately viewable after import on your website.
- ALLOW COMMENTS
- You have two choices here, too. If you put the number 1 here, comments will be open. If you use a number 0, comments for this post will be closed. You can open them later, and it’s recommended that you set them to be closed until you have finished all the editing and checks after the import has been made, or people might be writing comments about how messed up the post is and you will spend more time checking comments than cleaning up your site. It’s up to you.
- CONVERT BREAKS
- Again, you have two value choices. To not convert breaks, use 0, and to convert breaks, use 1.
- ALLOW PINGS
- To allow pings, use the value 1, and to turn them off on this post, use 0.
- PRIMARY CATEGORY
- You have two choices for your categories, a primary category and a subcategory, called “category”. WordPress uses parent categories and the subcategories are also known as children categories. If your post has only one category, list it here. The category can be one or more words with spaces or dashes in between, but no commas or other characters.
- Category
- If your post is also in a subcategory or is a child category, state the subcategory here. If the post isn’t in a subcategory, remove this line.
- Date
- Manually edit the date based upon the American format of month/date/year and include the time as follows:
07/21/2003 03:10:03 PMIf you want a different date format, that is controlled from within WordPress. WordPress sorts posts chronologically from most recent to oldest. If dates aren’t important to your content, they are important to creating an order to the posts in a series. Posts which run in series should be dated as follows:
Article 1 March 15 Article 2 March 14 Article 3 March 13 Article 4 March 12 Article 5 March 11 Article 6 March 10 This way, the order is preserved even if the dates are unimportant.
Recheck Manually
Eyes get tired going through all this data, but take time to rest them by saving this information and then coming back to it at least six hours later. Overnight is even better. This way, you are refreshed and ready to look at all of this with new eyes.
Look for little details that might have gotten forgotten or missed in the first manual edits. Stray unwanted code might have been missed, a title or author forgotten, or some other detail. Go through it all with a mental magnifying glass to see if you can catch anything that you don’t want or that might get in the way of the import.
Make sure that every web page record has the record divider of the 8 dashes and the fields are separated by 5 dashes. If anything is blank, delete it. Leave only the barest essentials you need for the import.
If you are really serious about this, spell check your post content and then do one more thorough edit to see if there is anything more than can be cleaned up.
With the HTML inside of the post content, make sure that all the tags are still there, and all open tags are closed and all self-closing tags are closed.
Things You Need To Know
A lot of questions come up during these imports and here are a few of them with the answers:
- What about my intra-site links?
- Intra-site links are links within a post or article that link to another one on your site. Leave them. They will import just fine and you can later either manually edit them to the correct URL address or redirect the links through the use of the .htaccess file rewrites and redirects.
- Will quote marks or apostrophes halt my import?
- Unlike an import directly into the MySQL database, WordPress’s import-mt process ignores quotes and apostrophes in the post content section so they will import without any problems. Just leave them alone.
- What about links to my graphics and photographs? Will I lose them?
- If you leave your graphics and photographs in the same folders that they currently reside in, and remove the relative links to them, so instead of the image link being:
../../photos/travel/spain/barcelona42.jpgYou remove the dots and slashes to the following, if
photosis in your site’s root folder:/photos/travel/spain/barcelona42.jpgIf it isn’t, then add the parent folder before
photosfolder with a forward slash in front of it. If you keep all your graphics and photographs in specific folders, this can be easily changed later, after the import, if you have problems seeing the images. - What will happen to my styles listed in the
headof each web page? - If you have any styles listed in the
headof any web pages, this information must be moved into the corestyle.CSSfor the WordPress Theme you are using, or set into another separate style sheet that you can add later using one of the many WordPress conditional tags within the WordPress PHP Loop. If it is not saved, it will be lost, as such information must be removed from the import file.Any inline styles such as:
<p style="font-size:110%; color: green; margin: 10px">will remain undisturbed so you can leave them.
- Will it import duplicate posts?
- By default, the WordPress import scripts will not import duplicate posts, saving you a lot of time and effort to track those down.
Begin the Import
Once you have triple checked your import document, and your concerns have been answered, then it is time to put WordPress’ import-mt.php to work.
Save the file as import.txt, making sure that the file is indeed a text file and not any other type. Upload the file to the wp-admin folder on your WordPress site. Then direct your browser to the following address, using your specific website information:
http://example.com/wp-admin/import-mt.php
The rest of the process is up to WordPress.
If you do get an error, it is usually very specific so you can track it down. Or not all of the posts will import. It will show you the list of what has been imported. If some haven’t been imported, this is usually because the 8 and 5 dashes lines weren’t set right, or there is some other detail that is not right in the import file, like “category” being misspelled. Carefully check that post against the other ones to help find the error.
If you find the error, you can either copy and paste that page record into its own import.txt file and repeat the import, or reimport the fixed original import.txt files, as WordPress will not permit duplicate posts to be imported. The fixed post will be imported and the rest should be ignored.
If you are really having trouble with a particular post, then manually add it to WordPress through the Administration Write Post screen, copying each bit of information into the right spot.
If it worked great and everything imported, then it’s time to start checking the results in WordPress. To view the new material, type your site’s URL in the browser and crawl around looking. There may be a few little bits and pieces that aren’t right, but you can now go into the WordPress Admin area and edit your posts to clean up these details. As long as they are in the database, you can do anything you want with them.
Our goal as been achieved!
When a photographer is planning a trip, season plays a big part in the decision-making process. There are unique photographic opportunities specifically related to weather and the seasons: fall colors, winter whites, spring flowers, summer heat. The seasons come at different times to different locations. Fall colors begin in late August and early September for Alaska and the far north of Canada. Following the color south through the Rockies and on to the plains, fall arrives in Oklahoma by October. Spring begins throughout most of the continental United States in March and April, but in the high mountain alpine meadows, spring may be as late as July. Planning your travels means researching prime times specific to a location.
spring bloom, for instance, can be difficult to plan on. The famous Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, Washington is usually in April. People come from all over the world to see the tulip fields at their peak. During intense effects from the El Niño weather inversion, tulips have bloomed up several weeks early, leaving the festival and parades celebrated among wilting or faded fields. Double check with local authorities, information or visitor’s bureaus for times and availability as things change from year to year.
Spring is a time of change. It is time for baby animals, new growth, rainbow fields of flowers, 
Summer is the time when more film is consumed than any other, besides holidays. People are outside, wandering around, kids are out of school, vacation time abounds, and the weather is such – you just want to be out there – along with everyone else. Summer, for the outdoor photographer, is not always the best time to photograph. The 
Many nature and outdoor photographers shun the heat and vote for travel and exploration of our natural areas during the less crowded seasons from Fall to Spring. Bright overcast days are more common during the fall and winter, bringing out the natural colors of your subject. Early morning and late afternoon light lasts longer, warming up your scenic or subject with rich and intense tones. Autumn is a time when all that is green or turned brown begins to radiate in rich, warm colors of red, orange, and gold. Trees begin their preparations for winter by changing color and losing their leaves. Many mammals also finish their preparations for winter with new warm fur growths and mating season rituals. Frost starts appearing again as the nights grow colder, creating fascinating patterns on leaves and plants. It is a last minute rush as nature begins to slow down for winter.
Winter makes the land turn into an interesting variety of textures, patterns, lines, and shapes. 
We have every kind of map you can imagine for our life on the road. Street maps, local maps, fold-out maps, computerized maps (two different programs!), maps in books, maps on backs of flyers and, our personal favorite, hand drawn maps from people we meet along the way with a locale in mind that we CANNOT miss. With all these maps, you would think we’d have mastered the art of navigation. Well, we’re getting better but it’s still a challenge.
Second, you must have the ability to gauge distance. Maps are strange things. One inch on one map is 1 mile and on another it is 25 miles and on the next it’s 100 miles. Travel outside the US and those miles become kilometers and for those unfamiliar with the metric system, like me, you have no clue how far 1 kilometer or 20 kilometers is. In one huge US atlas, Texas covers two pages, as does Florida, but Alaska is on the same page with Hawaii. As we drive into a town, we move from the state map with the highways to the city maps with the street names, and I often forget on how far it is on which map I’m reading. I will think it’s a good distance when it’s only a mile. Or the mile I was familiar with on one map will become twenty on the next. So I have to stay “distance conscious” all the time.
The language of the map is not an easy one. Sometimes, as soon as I find the identifying street sign on the map, we are past it. So this involves planning ahead. I’ll say to the driver, usually my patient husband, “We’ve just passed Smith Street. The next one is Anderson. Then Harold. After that is Jackson. Turn right there.” This tells the driver to move over into the right lane to turn, and he has three blocks to do it in. Or at least that is what you think he understood you to say. You have to think ahead all the time, translating into driver language as you go.
Highway access signs, those that should direct you from the center of town to the highway, or from the highway to the center of town or another highway, are sorely lacking in most communities. Even in major cities, we can be paralleling a major highway for twenty blocks, see it through the buildings, but never see a sign pointing towards the access ramp. We drove around in circles through Charleston, SC, in the old part of town trying to find access to the highway passing right over our heads. Why they do this is just another nightmare for the navigator to lose sleep over.
Sit down outside of the vehicle with the driver and talk out your course. Do this when time and tempers are relaxed. Go through the map and point out landmarks. Discuss the route thoroughly, highlighting the landmarks, so that you both understand in advance what is going to happen. No surprises means no temper flares or arguments during the voyage.
Don’t be afraid to ask the driver to stop so you all can confer with the map. Plan ahead for a pull off or to turn into a gas station or school, a place which is safe to stop and you have plenty of room to get back out with ease. Stop and take your time to look at the map together and make sure you know where you are going.
Florence Rose Hein, of Marysville, Washington, died of cancer December 27, 2004, at the age of 78. Her last days were at Everett Transition Care, where she received loving care. Her friends, Ramona (Boylan) Fletcher, Robert Fletcher, Margaret Moore, and Michele Martineau spent many hours at her bedside, holding her hand and helping to make her comfortable.
Closeups in Nature Photography
There are two methods to get the information into your database. One is INSERT and the other is LOAD DATA INFILE. After a lot of research, I thought the best one for me was INSERT as it felt much more open and easy to work with, but it turned out that LOAD DATA INFILE, while requiring the data to be in the exact field in order, was the best for importing the majority of the information directly into the database. I did use INSERT later, as I became more familiar with the process, but only for much smaller file uploads.