On the /me/import page, there is a form for importing posts. I’m hoping to use this functionality to migrate my posts from another service, thoughts.page, but I can’t find any documentation on how the import functionality works or how data must be formatted for input.
I have hundreds of posts on thoughts.page, and thoughts.page does offer an export of posts, so this “Import posts” functionality might save me a lot of time. It’s true that thoughts.page exports posts in CSV format, and I suspect that is not what WriteFreely/Write.as imports, but I might be able to convert the data from CSV to the format that WriteFreely/Write.as needs.
How does the “Import posts” functionality work, and can it be used to import posts from another platform? What format must posts be in for them to be uploaded to the “Import posts” form?
The format that can be imported is identical to the format that is exported when using the txt link on the export page. To learn more about that format, follow these steps:
Visit the export page (/me/export).
In the row labelled Posts, click txt.
A ZIP file will be downloaded.
Extract that ZIP file.
Look for the .txt files that were extracted from the ZIP files.
Those extracted .txt files are in the format that can be imported. In other words, if you want to import posts from another service (e.g., thoughts, Medium, or Wordpress), first export your posts from that service, then convert them to be like the format of those .txt files that were exported from Write.as (one .txt file per post), then import those .txt files. Note that the import page (/me/import) allows you to select multiple files at the same time.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to specify, in those .txt files, the time that the post was originally published. For that reason, if you import posts from another service and you want to preserve the original publish time (i.e., if you want Write.as to say that the post was published when it was originally published, not when it was imported), you may need to fix that manually. To edit the publish time of a post on Write.as, edit the post, then click on the “i” icon.
Yep, you’re right about how the import functionality works – it’s meant for handling individual plain-text and Markdown files, with the option to upload multiple at once.
As for the published date, the import tool will use the last modified time of the file itself. This should generally work if you’re importing from something like an offline editor. But otherwise you could potentially modify that on each file before importing, if you didn’t want to handle it manually within Write.as afterwards.