Atoms Moved

I've now successfully imported a 700 post blog into draft.blogger.com

There were a few more quirks of blogger.com along the way. Having next and previous links in the Atom feed causes blogger to reject the entire import file, so I ended up putting them in as comments. There were also some old posts that didn't have an author (perhaps from some beta version of Roller, and blogger rejected those due to the empty name field.
Finally, I had an old comment from the blog's early days that was not UTF-8 encoded in the database (it doesn't appear correctly in Roller either), so I had to reencode that before blogger.com would accept it for import.

Moving Atoms

Having now found an apartment in Malaysia, I'm now faced with the logistics of moving. One problem I'm facing is that for the last 5 years I've run my own server, which now supports several blogs, a forum and my mobile phone's OTA backup. If I knew it was just for a week or two, I could take it offline temporarily, but from what I can tell, internet connectivity in Malaysia is probably not going to be reliable enough to keep all this online for a reasonable proportion of the time, and unless I pay serious money I'll be stuck with the hassle of a dynamic IP address. So I'm looking to migrate at least the blogs and forum off to other services. I've just finished migrating the posts and comments from my first blog (there are still hard links back to my server that need fixing), which was no easy task, as although draft.blogger.com supports Atom based import, it is very particular about some things, with very little documentation and completely useless error handling - it just seems to stop processing as soon as it finds something it doesn't like, and if nothing has been imported yet you get a general meaningless error message, but if one or more posts were successfully imported, it just silently fails to import the posts starting with where it failed. So here is what I found.