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hello simple-people! er.... gsimple? Dodgy
*mods please move or modify as necessary*
i am a new user and, so far, completely content with the CMS that you have created - in fact, after having gone through a number of other CMS - it was a relief to find gs.
in a few days of puttering around i have managed to implement all of the essential features that i currently require for my site.
my issue is this. i formerly blogged on a public site and, while there, created an extensive archive. i have a backup of all the posts locally (in .doc format). i have chosen gs-blog as my blog manager. i am seeking to restore my blog archive with original pub dates and titles - essentially, to re-create what i used to have elsewhere.
do you experts, gurus and other happy contributors have any suggestions how this could be accomplished without actually have to re-post and retro-date everything.
thank you in advance for your input.
cheers!
welcome here!

But I have a bitter answer: There is no tool for converting DOC / proprietary format to GS

I am sure you had your former blog with some system, let it be Wordpress or whatever.
Now you want to transfer this content to GS

But you transferred your content to WORD-format .. that is not a good start, as all structure is lost.

To import content from Word (formatted text + metadata like author, date, categorey etc.) is strictly not possible, only manual "importing" from WORD and by that, do not forget to paste from WORD using "the paste from word"-button ;=(
Yeah if it was atleast native wordpress export xmlfiles you could do a conversion, granted noone has written one yet but it would be fairly easy.
As a fast way of porting your doc to GS, I'd firstly move it to a text file and search-> replace some things, to make it somewhat xml compliant.
After you prepare all things like headers, excerpts and post content (look at GS xml page structure) you can use a pagify plugin to achieve an archieve of imported content, or slice the content into GS xml compatible pages, and simply move them into /data/pages directory
BUT !
GS isn't a blog content manager (although there are plugins to achieve such funcionality) and because of that, you have to make some compromises.
Hullo good folks!

Thank you so much for getting back to me. Big Grin
My answer is this: 'Oh dear, I was afraid you were going to say that.'

My backup is the original files - the site I used offers no backup facility. What I always did was write first in Word, then save as text and upload to the site. I never wrote online for fear of glitchiness.

But, what I understand from you is there might be a process - yojoe sort of outlined it.

@shawn - relatively easy, FOR YOU!! HA!! Smile

And, fearing the worst, I had thought that it might be possible to directly 'hack' my database from the server.

If I could convert my .doc files to XML and retain time stamps, would I be potentially any further ahead? I could, possibly, then do the tag insertion and... oh hell, I dunno. *sorry* Tongue It almost seems to me to be a thing that could be accomplished via a dos batch or other kind of scripting.

Someone, please, just give me a smack if I'm being too hopeful!!

Thank you again for your input. cheers!
Theoretically you can export your dbase tables or even certain table cells to an xml file.
But you'd still need to adjust xml structure to GS "compliant" - I assume you do not have to provide all xml tags, as they might just be ignored - and slice the dbase xml file into portions (GS pages).

Anyway manual input is a must have.
You may search for some helpful apps, but I'm not familiar with XML converting tools.
Start with this one: xml-converter.com
(2013-05-08, 08:36:47)yojoe Wrote: [ -> ]Theoretically you can export your dbase tables or even certain table cells to an xml file.
But you'd still need to adjust xml structure to GS "compliant" - I assume you do not have to provide all xml tags, as they might just be ignored - and slice the dbase xml file into portions (GS pages).

Anyway manual input is a must have.
You may search for some helpful apps, but I'm not familiar with XML converting tools.
Start with this one: xml-converter.com

you are an adventurous soul, yojoe! HA!
i suppose it would become, in the end, a 'six of one, half dozen of the other' situation in terms of manual editing.
oh well... i did it once. i guess i can do it again.
although, if i might suggest, having a 'blog import' facility native to GS (or its blog plugins) might not be a bad marketing approach. if people knew that, within certain constrains, they could move their blog, it would encourage people to adopt the platform.
(that's just me spouting off...)
cheers!
Big Grin
Well the good thing about xml is, that you can write a converter since you are simply reading in the files and adjusting then saving backout to gs format.

With another format we have to do alot of massaging of the data to extract the title, body, etc, if even possible.

perhaps you could post an example of one of these docs you have
[attachment=185]
(2013-05-09, 23:23:57)shawn_a Wrote: [ -> ]Well the good thing about xml is, that you can write a converter since you are simply reading in the files and adjusting then saving backout to gs format.

With another format we have to do alot of massaging of the data to extract the title, body, etc, if even possible.

perhaps you could post an example of one of these docs you have

howdy shawn...Smile
i've attached a sample of what i do..
there are between 4 and 500 of these short stories that i am dealing with - or you can just look at what i've started to do on my site (badlydrawnstickman.com).
given the 6-of-one/half-dozen-of-the-other nature of this as i was saying to yojoe above, i've started the manual process (re-upping everything) but i gotta say that it is dead slow to do. so far, i've managed to do most of 2011... HA!
*edit*
i just had a think about this and had another silly idea.
what if i used a spreadsheet to re-create the database?
it would make insertion of markup and tags simple/repetitive (copy/paste) and, at the end, export as text and rename the file to XML. am i off the deep-end (again)?
*edit*
any advice is warmly appreciated.
cheers!