Radio Stories to Movable Type

I'll just keep askin' until the right person sees it:  I'm still working on getting Radio "stories" into my MT blog.  Since I started "mirror-blogging" everything into MT, when I have a post ---usually done in Radio first,  and then copied and pasted over in MT (usually within a day, sometimes right away) ,  and that post gets long,  I copy the post over into a "Story" and post a notification/summary and link to that story in the Radio blog.  I can use Radio's shortcut feature (by simply enclosing the name of the Story in quotes, and radio converts the Shortcut (eg. :  "The Story's Name") into the proper A href link (ie. href="thelink.html" with "The Story's Name" as the link text).  When I copy these into MT, I have been using the "extended entry" feature to post stories (so they don't show up on the main index page,  but are linked via the "Continue Reading xxxx" link that MT provides.

I still have a whole "backlog" full of old stories ,  which I need to get into MT,  as well as Radio shortcuts to them ,  which didn't get translated into links,  so they show up just as the quoted text that I see in my Radio editor,  prior to Radio's Publish function which writes the ahref link as it writes the post into the proper html files and rss file(s) before it uploads them to the server.  I was able to "export" all of the "Shortcuts" into an access database (Radio 's behind the scenes application does have some "Programming and eport/import tools" that enabled me to export a delimited txt file that I could then import into Access.  I need some way of searching and replacing the MT database (in a MySQL database) text that is in quotes --- finding text inside double quote marks,  looking up that text in the Access database,  finding it and grabbing the "linkURL" column for that record,  and replacing the "ShortcutName" with the a href tag set to make it into a link with the ShortcutName as the link text. 

Then there's the matter of getting the Stories themselves into MT (which must come before the previous procedure in the above apragraph, since I'll need to get the new URL ---from the MT database by "title" --which would be the same as the Shortcut Name in Radio.  )

I may have to do all this manually.  I'd probably be done with it before such an answer ever came ,  if ever.  But if there are any ideas about this, I'd love to "geek out" with you,  although anybody with an idea about this may well be "more deeply geeky" than I (I say this in an affectionate sense for that "geek in us") 

I used an export routine (Bill Kearney's Exporter) to get my Radio posts into a format importable by MT.  But this does not handle "Story" posts,  nor the conversion of any links.  In fact,  it also leaves the Radio macros in there,  but I was able to get it to search and replace the right stuff from all the image.ref macros on both the left and the right side of the image macros.    

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:41:07 PM.