Moving Your Blog To Jekyll: The Translation

UPDATE: I’ve written an MTIF gem and have a working jekyll-import with MTIF though it’s not yet merged into the main project.

tl;dr: If you’re planning to move or export a blog to Jekyll, first look at Jekyll Importer. Hopefully, you’ll save a fair bit of time. If you’re moving from Typepad, it’s a bit complicated.

Moving from Typepad is relatively straightforward, but not yet a smooth path. Step 1 is universal: export your blog to MTIF format. From there, you’ll find a number of ways to do the translation.

I first found https://github.com/dams/typepad_to_jekyll, a perl script which does a good chunk of the work. I found a couple of burning issues with this one:

1. It used 1 or 0 for the Jekyll Front Matter published tag. Jekyll requires this to be true or false. Since 0 is truthy in Ruby, this means all your drafts would be instantly published. Turns out I had an embarrassingly high number of drafts.
2. It didn’t quote post titles. If your post titles contain quotes or colons, this could cause Jekyll to fail to generate these properly.

I forked and fixed those, but there were other things I wanted to get working like carrying the permalink and the date into each post. In the end, I decided to move on. This is when I discovered jekyll-import, which handles a Movable Type instance by attaching to the database but doesn’t handle a Movable Type export file.

Okay, so all I need is a parser for the export file and writing the importer for Jekyll will be a snap. Ideally, there’d be a gem I can import, but life is rarely ideal. Instead, I found two other projects who’ve written parsers in Ruby:

• Typepad to Jekyll (blog post). Chris found the same perl script and wrote this instead. It does a fair job, but the code isn’t segmented in a way I could use directly in a jekyll-importer.
• Marc Chung’s ruby-mtexport. This has a well-segmented parser, but isn’t a gem. I’ve written Marc a note to see if he’ll gemify it; if not, I’ll write up an MTIF parser gem and make the importer.

So hopefully this is a good jumping-off point if you were looking to move from Typepad to Jekyll. I’ll either update this post or add another when/if I get back to the jekyll-importer project.