Migrated blog from Mephisto to WordPress

I used to host my blog with Mephisto. Mephisto is blogging software written in Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, the Mephisto project has been abandoned: http://techno-weenie.net/2010/6/23/you-can-let-go-now

While it was still running fine for me, I wanted to make changes to my blog, and I figured it was time to move to software that is still active.

After searching around, I decided to move to WordPress. My main reasons were:

1. Existing script to migrate all of my posts and comments from Mephisto.
2. Lots and lots of useful plugins.
3. Widely used and actively developed.

I used a project on github called mephisto-to-wxr to export my Mephisto content as a WordPress export file. The script was a little outdated, so I forked and got it working with with my setup. You can check out my fork at: https://github.com/pgr0ss/mephisto-to-wxr

The syntax highlighting plugin I used with Mephisto required tags around code that looked like:

<pre><code class="ruby">
</code></pre>

In WordPress, I’m using a plugin called WP-Syntax which requires tags like:

<pre lang="ruby">
</pre>

To get the required output, I ran the WordPress export (which is xml) through the following sed command:

sed 's/<\/pre>/<\/pre>/g' > pgrs.net.syntax_fix.wxr

For those interested, here is my current setup in WordPress:

• Suffusion theme
• Plugins:
  • WordPress Importer to import the exported wxr file
  • Akismet to prevent comment spam
  • About Me 3000 for the About Me in the upper right
  • WP Super Cache for page caching
  • WP Syntax for syntax highlighting