My Xanga Mess

Recently a friend despaired over Xanga shutting down. I incorrectly recalled a couple years ago they had a tool for migrating content to WordPress. (I probably confused it with Vox, LiveJournal, MovableType, Friendster’s blog, or Posterous who did have such a tool which I did use to migrate my content.) So I thought I had migrated my stuff.

Instead back then I manually migrated the posts, including comments.

Now Xanga has an archives generator (XML) which is compatible with WordPress. That was much easier than post-by-post copying and pasting.

But it also means 2001 to 2004 are duplicated. And I was terribly inconsistent about titling, merging posts, comments, and private/public status.

On the plus side, reading all those old those old posts is enlightening.

1. I write too much about work.
2. Most of what I wrote could have been tweets as they were less than 140 characters. (Or nudged to be so.)
3. 10-12 years changes little. Same problems.