Yesterday, I moved all 3100 posts and 133 comments from the old Movable Type site to the shiny new TypePad site. It went fairly well, except there's a bit of a snag with images.
The TypePad file manager is nice for simple operations (create one directory, upload one file), but isn't so good at uploading a hundred files spread across six directories (which is what I needed to do). And there's no way to upload a zip file. It took a while (half an hour? an hour?) to upload everything, but it's not something I'll be doing every day, so I didn't mind too much.
TypePad doesn't like file names that contain spaces, so I had to rename a bunch of the more recent files.
That left only the problem of fixing all of the links to the images. Unfortunately, each & every one of them is a hard-coded reference to http://patrick-rice.net/Daybook/Images. I had to hand-edit some of the links anyway, to remove the spaces, but that left fifty or sixty (who counts?) entries still in need of fixing. Ten seconds with search & replace, and I'm done, thought I.
TypePad Basic doesn't have global search & replace. (Search, yes; replace, no.) As Charlie Brown would say, AUGH.
I have a choice: hand-edit all those links, or upgrade to TypePad Pro just long enough to do the replace, then drop back to Basic. Is it worth $10 to save myself a few hours of editing? Does anybody even care whether image links work in old posts?
If I'd been thinking ahead, I could have edited the links in the MovableType export file before uploading it to TypePad. Alas, I wasn't thinking ahead. I suppose I could also export the entire site, edit the links, then delete everything & re-upload. That would be faster than hand-editing all those posts, and cheaper than the one-month Pro upgrade - but would also run the risk of completely scrozzling the entire daybook.
Hm...what to do, what to do....