• brab
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  • From: Grenoble, France
  • Registered: November 03, 2007
  • Posts: 22

Topic: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

Hello,

I've been following MarsEdit for a while and it seems like a much nicer tool to publish my blog than what I'm currently using, but I have no idea how I could migrate to using it. I was wondering if there was some guide somewhere about this. Here is what I currently to:
- I own a domain name, and a machine (also running OS X) where my web site is running
- I use RapidWeaver to publish my site, which I find a huge gain of time from writing down html by hand (which I used to do)

What I would want is:
- keep the domain name, and the machine for most of my website
- keep using RW for most of my website (except the blog maybe)
- use MarsEdit to manage my blog
- I'd be ready to use an external provider for the blog, but I want to keep the current URL of my blog
- if I can migrate my posts from RW to the new system, it would be great.

If there are suggestions on how to do this, or pointers to a guide or FAQ, I'd be really glad to learn more about this.

Thanks a lot,

Alan

brab's Website

  • From: Somerville, MA
  • Registered: January 27, 2005
  • Posts: 3,390

Re: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

Hi Alan - there are a few good choices that would probably work well for you. Is your blog currently in a subfolder of your web site? It would be pretty easy to setup Blogger or WordPress so that it publishes on your existing domain, in a subfolder. It's a bit more complicated if you are using the same folder for your blog and for other HTML files from RapidWeaver.

I don't know of any guides in particular for this kind of migration, but probably to get from your existing RapidWeaver-based blog to migrate the posts you would have to write a script or something that could import all of the HTML as separate posts into Blogger or WordPress.

What I suggest is to first set up a blog in a subfolder somewhere on your domain, and play around with it. Then you can slowly try to figure out how to migrate your existing posts over to it before you "pull the trigger".

Daniel

Daniel Jalkut's Website

  • brab
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  • From: Grenoble, France
  • Registered: November 03, 2007
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Re: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

Hi Daniel. Thanks a lot for your suggestions, it has pointed me toward many interesting things. Along the way I discovered that some of the blogs I like use Movable Type. You did not mention it in your post, is there a reason for this?

Thanks again,

Alan

brab's Website

  • brab
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Re: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

I have finally installed Movable Type, and the procedure was fine (as soon as I thought of setting the correct owner on the sqlite database). MarsEdit works great, so I will be able to test this next.

brab's Website

  • From: Somerville, MA
  • Registered: January 27, 2005
  • Posts: 3,390

Re: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

Movable Type is a great system. The only reason I don't mention it in general is because Blogger and WordPress are the simplest for most people to install and maintain, and they are also the systems that tend to  support more features that MarsEdit can control.

That said, MovableType is very "hackable" and you can set things up to behave in differing and powerful ways, using fields like the "Excerpt" and "Keywords" from MarsEdit. It's just a bit more work to get things set up and working perfectly so I don't generally mention it - I figure if people are looking for a "power" solution then they'll find it on their own smile

Daniel

Daniel Jalkut's Website

  • brab
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  • From: Grenoble, France
  • Registered: November 03, 2007
  • Posts: 22

Re: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

The reason I went with Movable Type is fairly coincidental: Blogger really did not attract me, and WordPress required the installation of MySQL (which I would need to do by command line as I do not have a physical access to the machine running my web server), and it seemed a bit tricky. Installing Movable Type with a sqlite backend was fairly straightforward, and I have found MarsEdit very helpful in moving my old posts to this new platform.

By the way, this all started because of your recent interview, which made me interested in MarsEdit again... Now I have many features to explore ;-)

brab's Website

  • From: Somerville, MA
  • Registered: January 27, 2005
  • Posts: 3,390

Re: Probably a FAQ: migrating from a RapidWeaver blog to MarsEdit

Hey, good to know the interview had a positive outcome ! smile

Daniel Jalkut's Website