Like all cool kids blogging nowadays, as part of the attempt to rejuvinate the blog, I’ve switched to Jekyll. Or, rather, the extended fork Octopress.

As part of the migration I wanted to extract all the old posts from Wordpress into the proper markdown format used by Jekyll.

Jekyll includes a migration script for Wordpress, but this used a direct database connection to the Wordpress MySQL server to extract a minimum amount of information for each blog post. To avoid missing information that I later might want after having shut down the Wordpress server, I wanted to base the migration on a full XML export from Wordpress. This way I could go back and extract more information from the old posts, if, and when, needed.

Seeing this as a chance to play with Ruby - a language I’ve only dabbled in previously - I set out to build a simple Wordpress XML->Jekyll converter. The converter reads the Wordpress export and converts all blog posts into separate files with a proper Yaml frontmatter. It also converts the syntax highlighting markup, code markup and headings into the corresponding markdown conventions. The rest of the HTML is left alone.

For the images I just copied the files in the old Wordpress structure into the new blog directory layout so that the URLs still match. Not the nicest way, but I was too lazy to do anything about it just yet.

Anywho - the source for the Wordpress XML converter is available in the blog branch of my fork of Octopress. The source is also given below. To use, just run with the filename of the Wordpress XML export as the first argument.

It’s my first publicly available Ruby program - so be careful. Improvements welcome!

/M