Hangs on "Please wait…" with spinner

Yeah, I’m doing the wordpress.com work-around right now. Unfortunately it does the same thing, remote-links the content. So I’ve copied all the media from the posterous export into my ftp and now manually updating every post. Not to bad for me since there’s only 40 posts in this blog. Definitely not the proper work around for anything bigger.

Weird, both importers should pull the image and video content in. We’d have a lot more complaints if this were a broader problem. Wonder if there’s something special about your blog. I’m glad yours is fairly small (manageable), at least. ??

I have over 1200 posts on a blog started in 2009, so I wouldn’t refuse any troubleshooting help, were it offered ??

This is the site:
dollsandmonsters.posterous.com

The dev version seems to be getting further, but it stops after about 31 posts for me. It’s hard to tell why it stopped. The URL shows: admin.php?import=posterous&step=3 and the right side of the page (next to the word press side bar) is blank. In another tab, I could see the posts were getting loaded for a while even though the page appeared not to be doing anything. Then the post count stopped increasing. I have 184 posts total in the blog I’m trying to import.

I’m also having the same issue as eatloaf. The sized.500 images are imported and displayed in the post, but the href around them links to the sized.1000 version on posterous.com. Is there any way to update those links?

Is there any way to import the original size images from posterous? or at least to import the sized.1000 versions into the posts instead of the smaller sized.500?

I have the same problem that the plugin doesn’t pull the image or video in but embeds the posterous link so they will all fail once the site goes down.

See if this plugin will help you fetch the images at least. And don’t forget to download the archive that Posterous provides. In the very worst case, you’ll at least have your media and can update manually.

The Posterous importer fails sometimes because the service you have to connect to rejects the requests. You can work around this by retrying after a couple of minutes sometimes. Another option that may help you work through the results a few at a time is to search the plugin for the string “function do_posts” and then change the $page = 1 to $page = 2 and so on until you have all your posts. Although the plugin specifies that 10 results should be returned at a time, the API seems to return 20 no matter what. So if you have 31 posts, you’ll want to set $page to 2 the first time so that you fetch posts 32 – 40.

It’s a bit cumbersome, but it may be the only option. I tested a site with over 7,000 posts yesterday, and the plugin worked like a charm, though I did have to hack $page two or three times during the import to get it to finish.

This morning, the dev version worked fine and imported the whole set. Dllh, I think you’re onto something with these latest issues being caused by the Posterous service on the other end of the call seems spotty. (maybe better chances of success at “lower traffic” times)

Also, when the importer ran through all on its own (instead of getting cut off somewhere in the middle), the links to the content are properly replaced with local links instead of going to posterous.com. On top of that, it even included the original, full size images this time. No code in the plugin I was using or my site changed between this attempt and the last, so it must be on the Posterous side. It seems just getting lucky with a good response from the Posterous service makes all the difference.

Great, I’m glad it worked for you! Guess we’ve just proven the old adage “if at first you don’t succeed…” ??

Correction to my last post… Only the first (most recent) post actually imported the images from Posterous and attached it correctly to the wordpress post. All others are still linked to Posterous files, both in the href and the img src.

UPDATE: Actually, only the first 34 images of that first post imported and attached correctly. All others are just links to the Posterous site for that post and all other posts.

I think we’re all getting slightly different results and varying degrees of success.

This is what an importer-created post looks like:

<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'>
<a href="https://getfile6.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dollsandmonsters/erHqnZEZkQ8hyATCkdXgOmLoM8sm9ESkidTgZJn12m7jtj6avrFqWREfYBoM/photo.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg"><img alt="Photo" height="500" src="https://getfile4.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dollsandmonsters/4SImirB8Nb1su4GI1bacyPJ4VbDT47MyccwgNzcE67JeiVzFnq88xljl7PAs/photo.jpg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a>
</div>

When I re-run the importer I see it skipping existing entries ( and only looks for new comments ).

Do I need to delete all posts before retrying if I hope to get different image results?

Hrmm.

At the end of the import process there is this spew:

Checking ” for media… 0 media files found
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found

followed by this spew:

Warning: array_pop() [function.array-pop]: The argument should be an array in /homepages/38/d89736386/htdocs/dollsandmonsters.com/wp-content/plugins/posterous-importer/posterous.php on line 513
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found

Warning: array_pop() [function.array-pop]: The argument should be an array in /homepages/38/d89736386/htdocs/dollsandmonsters.com/wp-content/plugins/posterous-importer/posterous.php on line 513
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found

Warning: array_pop() [function.array-pop]: The argument should be an array in /homepages/38/d89736386/htdocs/dollsandmonsters.com/wp-content/plugins/posterous-importer/posterous.php on line 513
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found

Warning: array_pop() [function.array-pop]: The argument should be an array in /homepages/38/d89736386/htdocs/dollsandmonsters.com/wp-content/plugins/posterous-importer/posterous.php on line 513
Checking ” for media… 0 media files found

My first post has a lot of pictures attached. The first 34 get imported correctly (original image attached to the post, local href and img src), and then it is as if the importer stopped updating the links, and the rest of that post (and all the next ones) is just the straight html from the Posterous posts.

Odd coincidence: 34 images actually imported, yet when I go to the importer again, it tells me that 68 images were imported, exactly double (in case that’s any indicator).

I was refreshing to get another couple pictures in each time, but it comes up with this (malformed) error now after the list of duplicate images it skipped. Is this helpful?

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All I can say is that it’s worked for me with big sites and very few issues, and that your mileage may vary with respect to how responsive the Posterous API is. Between that and bugs that surely exist in this beta plugin, results are bound to be inconsistent.

I suggest you download the backup that Posterous makes available, import into a blog at WordPress.com, and then export from there. You may still run into issues, but that style of import is more easily testable/supported.

It’s pretty much impossible to debug the sorts of things you’re encountering because even if I had access to your Posterous site, the API may suddenly become responsive, my php settings might be different, or any number of other things may change that would keep me from experiencing the same issues you experience.

I think there may be some PHP settings at work here too.

I just kept hitting refresh when the script locked, and it would add a few more media items each time. Some are missed (probably on the ones that lock it up), but most import fine, and the script avoids duplicate posts and media well.

Once I got past the part of my blog that had lots of high res pics, it started humming along and finished off all the rest without erroring out. Something to do with having a lot of high res images in a post seems to cause the importer to error, so it is probably a memory or time-out issue somewhere in there.