I start the daunting task of importing old bLog entries into my new Web site.

I thought it would be easy. I got all the text for each entry into an RSS import compatible format. And then I imported the entries.

That was my first big mistake: importing all 330 entries at once. What the heck was I thinking? The import wasn’t set up quite right and I wound up with 330 entries, all of which needed editing. WordPress has an decent entry editor, but it isn’t something I’d want to deal with for 300 entries. So I started deleting them, figuring I’d start over from scratch. And then I realized that it would take several hours to delete them all.

The solution: delete the database that makes up the site. Then rebuild it from scratch.

Not as easy as it sounds, but quicker and easier than manually deleting and editing the entries.

I went back to the drawing board. I opened the import file in TextWrangler (highly recommended) and used some sophisticated Find and Replace instructions to massage the entries. Then I began importing them a month at a time, starting with the oldest entries.

Not bad, but not perfect. The problem is the entries with images. For some reason, they have a different format applied. There are unrecognized characters and all the images are clumped up at the beginning of the entry. I have to manually edit each of them.

It isn’t fun. It’s long and boring and tedious. Worsethan copying over the wickenburg-az.com entries to that new site.

But I’ll finish it — eventually.

In the meantime, I’ll have to work harder at creating more interesting new entries.