Migrate Octopress / Jekyll Posts to Ulysses

I wanted to move my published writing stashed in my Octopress/Jekyll site into my current writing workflow environment, Ulysses. Dragging and dropping the files from the _posts folder was not an option, because:

The file names were messy
There is no title in the file, it’s in the Markdown metadata
I wanted to keep the publication date on the imported files

So, I wrote a horrible script to do it.

The script takes a _posts Octopress or Jekyll folder and processes each file into an OUT_PATH as a set of clean Markdown files, making a few changes along the way. It’s a mix of Ruby to handle the YAML front matter and shell commands to do the actual work. And it runs as follows:

For each file in the IN_PATH
Parse the YAML front matter to get the title and publish date
Create a new file using the title and write a Markdown H1 to it
Append the existing file data to the new file
Depending on how the publish date is formatted (old was a string, new is a time), touch the new file to set the original publish date

After that, I just dragged and dropped the Markdown files into Ulysses which kept the formatting and dates.

The script itself is below. Its terrible and you dare not use it. But maybe it has some ideas to help you run your own conversion.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'yaml'
require 'time'
  
# IN_PATH = "/Users/hiltmon/Projects/Personal/HiltmonDotCom/source/_posts/"
# IN_PATH = "/Users/hiltmon/Projects/Personal/NoverseDotCom/code/noverse/source/_posts/"
IN_PATH = "/Users/hiltmon/Downloads/_posts/"
OUT_PATH = "/Users/hiltmon/Desktop/Blog/"

Dir.new(IN_PATH).each do |path|
  next if path =~ /^\./
  
  basename = File.basename(path)
  puts "Processing #{basename}..."

  posthead = YAML.load_file(IN_PATH + path)
  title = posthead['title'].sub("'", '')
  
  # Create a new file and add the H1
  cmd2 = "echo \"# #{posthead['title'].strip}\n\" > \"#{OUT_PATH + title}.md\""
  %x{#{cmd2}}
  
  # Append the original Markdown
  cmd1 = "cat #{IN_PATH + path} >> \"#{OUT_PATH + title}.md\""
  %x{#{cmd1}}
  
  # Mess with the file time
  if posthead['date'].is_a?(Time)
    cmd3 = "touch -t #{posthead['date'].strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M")} \"#{OUT_PATH + title}.md\""
    %x{#{cmd3}}
  else
    file_date = Time.parse(posthead['date'])
  
    cmd3 = "touch -t #{file_date.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M")} \"#{OUT_PATH + title}.md\""
    %x{#{cmd3}}
  end
end

The result:

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