Golden Miles - Bulk import of 30+ old music Blog posts
What seemed like a quick task, turned into hours of work. But worth it. I had at least two Sadly Neglected Blogs still hanging around. The original SiC (reborn here) and one mainly on Music things (Golden Miles). Today I decided to export all the Golden Miles Posts and import them here.
They are different blogging systems (Blogger and WordPress) but the export/import of the 30+ Posts took just minutes. Of course, the real work then started.
Most of the Posts were some 9 years old and their YouTube links had long since been removed or changed. As they were the essence of the Posts, these links had to be updated. Which was a manual task: find the new YT link and edit the Post, remove the old link and drop the new one in the right place.
Took a while, but hopefully worth it to have everything in the one place and correctly tagged. Firstly here’s a quick list of most of the old Golden Miles posts now here:

And, to save time, they are all tagged as goldenmiles (click on that link to see them). For some reason the original Blog had a few non-music posts, but I left them in, as you’ll see. I’m glad the export/import left the original dates in place too.
Behind the Scenes and other stuff
Blog Name and Header Photo
The old blog was named after a superb Australian song and also had a great header image. It was taken, by me, after a long day hike at Wilsons Prom. From memory it was from the car park at Telegraph Saddle – high up on Mt Oberon – then walk to Sealers Cove and back. I had to rush near the end as it was getting quite dark and cold. The Saddle is high up and I took this looking West (derr) and you can see the ocean and some islands.

It was worth the ~19km return walk, BTW. Here’s someone else’s photo:
Tech Talk: Link Conversion
Initially, I thought all the YouTube links would have to be converted. The first one had links in this format:
http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/Yd60nI4sa9A&source=uds
Yuk. They just don’t work 9 years on. BUT, I spotted the Yd60… bit looks like a modern YouTube video id, from which the correct link is built:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd60nI4sa9A
I was quickly able to use a Regular Expression in RegexBuddy to convert that Post’s four links in one hit, via find and replace:

And then I found it was the only old Post that had this strange old format 🙂