PBworks migration

It was a good ride while it lasted (I was an early adopter), but it was time to move off the PBworks (formerly pbwiki) boat. My site was hard to read on my iPod touch, and the new 2.0 migration took away my ability to edit from my touch. I do most of my "personal" web browsing from my touch while Cale is nursing, but I don't do it often enough to want to pay for that feature. (I'm not fond of the 2.0 look either. I prefer simple. I think I'll be happy, possibly happier, with jottit, simpler than a wiki, and wikidot, so customizable and lovely page tags with a flying tag cloud, instead.) I decided that a lot of what I had in pbwiki didn't need to be online, so I decided to move it to Journler. I wish it were Alepin, but I want tags and Spotlight.

First I downloaded all of my files from my site (fill in your workspace name). I noticed that the zip file preserved the file modification times! Bonus!

I didn't like how Journler imported HTML (as an attachment to an otherwise-empty entry), though, so I decided to convert to RTF instead. I was sure it had to be easy on OS X, so after discarding non-simple Google results, I found textutil! Score!

I opened Terminal, and changed to the directory of my HTML files.

textutil -convert rtf *.html

mkdir rtfdir

mv *.rtf rtfdir

That was a nice start, but I lost the timestamps! I was sure I could keep those, and I know touch modifies timestamps ...

cd rtfdir

for filebase in $(ls *.rtf | sed 's/\.rtf$//g'); do touch -r ../$filebase.html $filebase.rtf ; done

Now to import into Journler ... no problem: my data are in the entry (not attached to it), and the timestamps are preserved as creation date! Not a bad piece of command-line tomfoolery to get exactly what I wanted without touching each file by hand. I like textutil!

Don't get me wrong: I think PBworks is a great service, and I don't think anything bad about it. But I know what features I want, and it was time for me to move on for my needs.