Importing Xanga RSS into WordPress
I am in the process of moving my wife’s blog over to WordPress from Xanga and ran into some errors trying to use the RSS importer that comes with WordPress. The error I was getting was “Importing post…Couldn’t get post ID”. So I did what any good husband would do and cracked open the rss.php importer script to see what the problem was. After a little investigation i found out what was causing the error.
The import script was parsing the xml for the title and the description by looking for the tokens <title> and <description> respectively. The problem is that Xanga’s RSS writes out its title and description tags with a few extra attributes so they look like this:
<title xmlns:cf=”http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005” cf:type=”text”>.
So after doing a little find/replace to make the title tag just say <title> and the description tag to just say <description> the importer worked like a charm!
