Infinite State

I wrote a bunch of posts over the years at a prior ISP, running MovableType. It turned out that MT was such a security hole, they had to shut it down. There were more pressing issues in my life, so I wasn’t blogging much and let it go. But when I landed here at Dreamhost and saw the easy install of WordPress, I was interested in bringing my old posts over. Well, it seemed like it should be easy, right? Just export, right? Except the server was no longer running…

So here’s my recipe for any folks who need to get their old stuff out, because it wasn’t as simple as it should have been. Could have been. If I’d had this list first:

(I’m running Win XP locally, and the MT files were in Berkeley DB files on my old ISP’s server, which I had SCP access to.)

1. Download and install Apache for Windows, not as a service.
2. Download and install Perl 5.6 (not 5.8) from ActiveState but make sure you set the install directory to be c:\usr, not c:\Perl (the default). This will simplify the cgi script executions.
3. Run the Perl package manager with “ppm -install db_file”.
4. Download and unpack the MovableType distribution into a folder. Rename the folder “mt” and move it under your Apache cgi-bin directory.
5. Touch up your httpd.conf file (I dropped threads to 10 but it’s not necessary).
6. Make sure to move the /mt-static/ folder under /htdocs, don’t leave it under /cgi-bin/mt/ or the scripts won’t work.
7. Follow the installation instructions for MT.

The trick is to get Apache invoking the .cgi files via Perl (you don’t need mod_perl for this) and I tried the registry approach but settled on the #!\usr\bin\perl trick.

Once you can run the /cgi-bin/mt-check.cgi, you’ll see that you’re covered (or not) and good to go. At that point, I was able to run the mt.cgi script, which wanted me to upgrade my DB files…uggh. That crashed the first time, but was able to complete the second, and then I was able to export my data.

WordPress happily ate it all up and they are now here, my past made accessible again. Too bad most of it’s not so relevant any more.

Anyway, it was better than doing the other things on my task list.