Other Blog Coming Along Thanks To The Other Jason

I continue to work on my other blog and importing the old files. Another Jason has been helping (we Jasons must stick together) and this email is telling him how I solved the annoying problem that when I imported the entries, all apostrophes and quotation marks were changed to question marks. This meant I had to go in and fix it by hand and I did all of November 1997 but vowed that there had to be a way around it.

Here is what I wrote:

I found it. I was pasting the text in a Word document, formatting it, and saving it as a text file. But by default it's coded as Windows (default). Wordpress wants UTF-8. When I did that and imported it, it worked great. Other accomplishments: I discovered that you can put HTML tags in the import file so that my Free Advice and Quote of the Day can get bolded in the import file using tags instead of doing each entry (~30 per month) by hand. I used your SQL statement to update the comment and ping fields in the database. For some reason, it makes all the imported entries as drafts and no pings allowed. I can UPDATE the entire table to fix this.

Now it's just a matter of massaging each month's entries in the import file. Long and tedious but doable and with your help, it's become faster.

Thanks.