Tonight I decided to move one of my blogs from the Blogs at PSU that I have stopped using over here to my main space. The blog I wanted to move is my iPhone blog that I set up during our investigation of the iPhone. There are a couple reasons I wanted to move it — getting the content in one location and to see how easy it is to leave the Blogs at Penn State. BTW, all my iPhone related posts are all under the category “iPhone” and can be accessed here.
I have been writing quite a bit about ePortfolio at the University and much of my thinking has centered on the Blogs at PSU as the primary tool for them. One of the questions I get asked a lot is how can students take their content with them when they leave. One of the things we talk about is that since the Blogs at PSU publish static pages into a directory the whole directory could be downloaded and burned to a CD. I haven’t tested that and while I think it would work, I am guessing it would take some tweaks to get the paths right for media and for the CSS. That method would also keep someone from updating their portfolio.
There are a number of commercial blog hosting spaces out there — WordPress.com and Live Journal are two of them. I wanted to see what would happen if I took my MovableType powered blog and simply chose to export it and import into a WordPress blog. The long story short is that it just worked. In the Blogs at PSU dashboard I was able to select export and it kicked out a downloaded .txt file that had my posts and all the comments in it.
Then in WP I was able to jsut go to the Options > Import screen and browse for the file.
From there all I did was select a user name for the files to be imported under. At that point I could easily edit the posts, add categories to them, or anything. Everything was preserved. I also just tested it out over at the free wordpress.com and it worked perfectly! So we do have an easy to use solution to let people take it with them when it is time to go.
Nice. That portability is one of the main reasons I’m trying to move from the Drupal community blogging site to a WordPress Multiuser setup. The thought of exporting a student’s work from a community drupal site makes me cringe, but WPMU has an easy peasy export/import utility. Gotta remember that it’s not our content, it’s theirs 🙂
D … Amen! Giving “them” complete control over their content is key to this whole thing. I am watching both of your new adventures — Blogs at UC and the public sector space you are going for. I am hoping people at your University and in your city get the value associated with what you are up to. If I had a wish, I would ask the Pennsylvania State Government to create a blog space that students in the K-12 space could have to do ePortfolio stuff with — all paid for by my tax dollars. How cool would it be for local/state/federal legislators to understand how important digital expression and personal reflection is to the overall life long learning traits we are trying to build? The things you are doing hit that mark — even if people don’t get it — yet!