so as part of my quest to determine if i want to move my blog from blosxom to typepad, i decided to see if i can bring over comments as well as entries.
it turns out that it is, with a few caveats.
you can set up a writeback flavour for dumpfiles, and that will get you pretty much all the way there, with the exception of the timestamps on the comments. the writeback plugin does not store timestamps for each comment, so you have to generate them yourself. i've got a little two line hack in my writeback plugin that adds a timestamp variable to writeback output, but generating it is kind of a hack, i just take the timestamp of the entry and as i loop over each comment i add one minute, so at least they end up in the right order, even if the real timestamp is impossible to retrieve.
yeah, it's a bit inaccurate, but without it you end up with all the comments having a timestamp equal to when you imported the dumpfile, which is kind of lame. worse than just being inaccurate, it means that they end up in reverse order, so if you tell typepad to show them oldest first, the latest comment you had posted in your original blog shows up first, rather than the earliest.
anyway, the last thing i have to try is categories. i don't know if i can do that without post processing to remove slashes, it will depend on how typepad deals with a slash in a category name.
