I've migrated away from Octopress and this site is now built using ToggleJS with a custom GulpJS file.
This article is Part 5 of 9 in a series about Migrating from BlogSpot to Octopress.
- Part 1 - Introduction
- Part 2 - Setup Octopress
- Part 3 - Export BlogSpot Content
- Part 4 - Import Content into Octopress
- Part 5 - (current) - Fix Links
- Part 6 - 301 Redirect Old Posts to New Location
- Part 7 - Setup a Custom Domain
- Part 8 - Redirect Atom/RSS in FeedBurner
- Part 9 - What's left?
Once you've ported your content into Octopress there were several steps I used to fixup links. The two types of links I cared about at this stage were:
- Cross-Post links (where I referenced one of my other posts)
- Broken links.
Cross post links
I used a text editor and some command line magic to search for http://staxmanade.blogspot.com/ and replace it with /blog/ so that my cross-referencing posts could link to a relative version of the blog instead of the full blogspot domain.
Depending on how you configure your permalinks you may need to do some more link manipulation. I had to search .html at the end of my cross-referencign posts and be sure to delete it since my old reference would look like
http://staxmanade.blogspot.com/2013/12/format-your-net-exceptions-to-see.html
but now should link to
/blog/2013/12/format-your-net-exceptions-to-see
If you're on Windows and not interested in figuring out a PowerShell or other command to quickly search and replace, a friend of mine Tim Greenfield has a great utility GUI tool for easy search and replace.
I don't recall exactly what I did, I think I either used sed or a python command on my Mac for the initial search/replace. I'll let you figure out the rest of how to get that task done.
Fix broken links
Once you're done fixing up cross-post links, we want to make sure we didn't mess anything up, and while we're at it, fix any old or out-dated links.
One great feature of Octopress is that we can run the site locally and use a spider tool to search for broken links. Run rake generate and rake preview locally to browse your site.
I used the Integrity link checker on my Mac to search the http://localhost:4000 site locally. There are lots of these tools out there, so feel free to use what you feel happy with.
This was a great exercise. Not only debugging any oopsies from the above cross-post fixup step, but allowed me to find any external links to blogs/images/etc that were out of date. I wasn't able to fix up all of my external links, but that's the way of the web unfortunately. I haven't done it yet, but have consider going back and linking the out-dated links to a version out on the Way Back Machine.