Blosxom Import Complete

I just finished importing all my Blosxom entries into b2evolution. The process was more or less painless; I just pulled down all the Blosxom entries in Movable Type format using the flavor I mentioned earlier, then processed the result with a Perl script, then ran b2evolution’s Movable Type import utility to bring the entries in. The Perl script basically catenates lines together in the body area of each entry, which makes the result look more attractive in b2evolution. Once the entries were in, I went through and made minor edits to make things look better.

The only thing I don’t care for about b2evolution is its insistence on sticking <br> tags at the end of every line, even within blocks of markup. This makes it really hard to include code snippets, because I can’t use <pre> blocks; I have to explicitly format everything and use &nbsp; entities to do spacing. There must be a way to make this work right, but I haven’t found it yet.

That aside, it’s nice to have a “real” blogging engine with all the associated bells and whistles. I’m sure I’ll figure out all of b2evolution’s various quirks over time.

Followup — Looks like the <br> tag thing is controlled by the Auto-BR option at the bottom of the page where you edit posts. It seems to be turned on for all the imported entries, and off for the native entries. When Auto-BR is off, it seems to be much better behaved with embedded HTML in entries.