This article, written by the one and only Accordion Guy Joey deVilla, explains how to import content from your Movable Type or Typepad weblog into your Blogware-powered weblog here at BlogHarbor.

From MovableType to Blogware in Six Easy Clicks

If you've ever had to move from one house or apartment to another, you know that it entails a lot of hassle. Between packing up your stuff into boxes, loading, travel, unloading, moving in and cleaning up, it's so much trouble that most people try to do it as little as possible.

However, my last move wasn't so bad. This time, I wasn't a starving student, so I got smart and hired movers to help. I still had to pack and unpack, but they did the heavy lifting, both figuratively and literally, and the process wasn't the ordeal I imagined it would be.

I like to think of my blog as an online version of my house; it's where I invite people, do some entertaining, and even show my vacation slides. Just as moving from one real-world house to another, moving from one blogging tool to another can be a very unpleasant and tedious process. Are there movers for blogs?

If you're moving to Blogware, the answer is "yes".

Let's consider this little Movable Type blog, pictured in its entirety below:

This blog doesn't have just entries, it has categories. I'd like to be able to not only import those categories; I also want to import my categorizations. In other words, if I had an article posted under Category X in my Movable Type blog, I'd also want it under Category X in Blogware blog.

There's more: some of the entries have comments. The comments don't just contain the title and text of the comments, but also the URLs and email addresses of the people who left them. If I were to switch blogging tools, I'd want to take them along.

Blogware's Import tool makes switching easy. For this simple blog, the Movable Type-to-Blogware move took me under a minute, and I wasn't rushing.

The first step is to export your blog from Movable Type. This is a one-click process that takes your blog and turns it into a text file which you can save on your hard drive.

Once you have this file, you can import it into Blogware. It's a simple matter of logging into Blogware and calling up its Import feature, shown below:

In the screenshot above, I've selected the Movable Type option (which imports Movable Type and TypePad blog export files) and selected the export file. I've also checked the Create categories referenced in import file checkbox, which tells Blogware that I want to import my Movable Type categories.

Clicking the Preview Entries button starts the importing process. There are two ways to go through this process:

• You can go through each entry in your blog, reviewing it and even making changes if needed, or
• You can ask Blogware to import it all at once.

Let's review the first entry to be imported:

As you can see, Blogware read the title and body perfectly. A quick glance to the right confirms that the categories under which this article was posted were also read in:

...and a glance down shows that the comments, along with all the information attached to them, were read in too.

Blogware offers many options when importing a blog, as you can see below.

I took the simple route and clicked the Import All button. Since the blog was a small one, it took only a couple of seconds, and the process was complete. A click of the View Blog button in Blogware's Control Panel gave me this:

A click on the permalink for the "Chicken and Waffle" entry gave me this:

The move is complete, and everything -- entries, comments, categories -- is intact. Just as the movers made moving into my house much easier, Blogware's import tool made "moving in" quite painless. In fact, if we count starting from Blogware's import tool page, the move from Movable Type to Blogware took six clicks!