Moving Your TypePad Blog To Jekyll: The Re-Translation

In my first post about moving from TypePad to Jekyll, I discussed a few ways you can translate your TypePad.com blog into Jekyll, noting that the Jekyll Importer would be the best way to go but for its lack of an MTIF importer. As I got further into the post-install cleanup, there were enough little things like lost permalinks and the like that I decided to go the whole way and add MTIF as a Jekyll importer.

Right now it’s just my fork of the jekyll-import project with a wholly untested MTIF converter implemented on the typepad_converter branch. As a bonus, it’ll convert your old posts to Markdown using Johannes Opper’s reverse_markdown gem.

If you’re desperate to use it before I get it tested and merged into jekyll-import, you could do something like this:

$ cd ~/work
$ git clone git@github.com:purp/jekyll-import.git
$ cd jekyll-import
$ git checkout typepad_export
$ RUBYLIB=~/work/jekyll-import/lib jekyll import mtif --source path/to/your/mtif

Yes, I have shame for not TDD’g this. I’ll confess that I don’t TDD when I’m exploring something new as I’m usually learning so much that my test hypotheses are crap at the beginning.

Cue discussion of ends and means and justifications.