Its been about a month since my blog moved to octopress, wanted to write about my experience. I had been running my blog for a some time now using Movable Type upgrading as and when new versions where released. Over time I realized that upgrading was fraught with errors as lot of steps had to be done manually. Customizing the layout was risky as there was no way to preview your changes and commit only when I was comfortable. With the release of Movable Type 6 there is no longer a free version to download.
There had been a a surge is usage of static html to write blogs. I was thinking about moving to a static blogging platform like Octopress. One of the major problems of this move was to extract existing blog entries along with their published dates, categories and blog txt from the Movable Text blog. The I read Neal Sheeran’s blog about using templates to export the data.
Using the techniques described by Neal I created a template to export my Movable Type blog into files which I curated using some scripts, manual editing, some de-duplication and normalization of categories. After words I had to move the assets I had into Octopress and change the links accordingly in the blog posts. Once this was done I put a custom 404 page in place and was ready to go.
Using octopress has been great, especially since I can preview all my changes before delopyment and deploy using rake deploy.