Move a whole blog into Squarespace in one import

Squarespace has no bulk import of its own, and it has one that it borrows: the WordPress WXR format. That is the whole trick. A platform migration that looks impossible from the outside is a format problem, and once the posts are in the shape the importer expects, seventy articles arrive in one go instead of seventy evenings.

The part that decides whether a migration is a success is not the conversion, it is the dates. A blog imported with every post dated today throws away years of publication history, and with it the archive structure, the sense of a publication that has been running, and a good deal of the search authority attached to those dates. Preserving the original dates costs nothing at import and cannot be recovered afterwards without doing it all again.

Slugs matter for the same reason and are less forgiving. A published URL that changes is a broken link and a lost ranking, and every inbound link anybody ever made now points at a 404. Where a migration has to change a slug, the answer is a redirect from the old one, decided before the import rather than discovered afterwards.

Scheduling is the useful thing that falls out of getting the dates right. Future dated posts import as scheduled rather than published, which turns a backlog into a publication plan: write ten, import once, and let them go out over ten weeks. That is a considerably better position than a folder of drafts and good intentions.

The conversion runs in your browser, which is not a small detail for a migration. An unpublished backlog is a commercially sensitive thing, and so is a client's entire content archive. There is no upload, no queue and no size limit beyond what your machine can hold.

This is the applet that made the rest of the shelf exist. It was built because a real migration needed it and nothing else did the job, which is the honest description of most of what Pivotal Labs makes: the tools we needed for the work, tidied up enough to give away.