Daryl L. L. Houston (dllh)

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.

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. ??

Try using this dev version of the plugin instead and see if it works any better.

In all the testing I had done when I built the dev plugin, media files were imported and had their links updated. I wonder if something has changed. Patches are most definitely welcome. ??

The production version of the importer uses the old API. There’s a dev branch of the plugin referenced in a few posts here that may work somewhat better, but in general, you should consider both APIs essentially deprecated with the service going away in a couple of months. To be safe, go through the export steps Posterous recommends. If you can get the API to work, consider it a bonus. The first priority should be downloading the backup file Posterous provides, as it’ll be the only surefire way to make sure you have all of your media files in particular.

Yep, that’ll work. It’s flagged for staff attention now.

@arvind, please open a support ticket at https://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/ and we’ll try to get you sorted out over there.

The importer should pull the files in, but since it can’t know what media embed plugins you have installed, it can’t do anything with them. This thread includes a rundown of how one guy handled it (with a little help from a custom plugin I wrote for him). Maybe that’ll get you started. Worst case, as long as you’ve downloaded your backup file from Posterous, you can manually upload new videos into the posts.

The whole download may be a few hundred MB, but that’ll include photos, videos, etc., which aren’t part of what you upload to WordPress.com. See how big the wordpress_export_1.xml file is. There’s a good chance it’s small enough to upload. If even that is too big, open a support ticket from https://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/ for help importing a large file.

You could also try editing the Posterous importer plugin to increase the time between connections it makes to the server. I doubt this’ll fix your issue, but look for the “usleep” command and change the first digit of the number it receives as a parameter to a 2, just to test and see.

Whatever you do, go ahead and use Posterous’s backup feature to download your site content, as the service is going away on April 30. You can use the xml file in the backup to import using the WordPress (not the Posterous) importer, but it’s not 100% reliable because fo the composition of the xml file. Better to have the photos/data on your hard drive than not, though.

It’s kind of hard to say. These are tricky to troubleshoot. If you start the importer over, in theory it should grab the next batch of posts.

In any case, you should go ahead and use Posterous’s backup tool to fetch your content, as the service is actually going away in a couple of months. You can use the backup tool to import into your blog using the WordPress (not the Posterous) importer. The backup file currently has some bugs that the WordPress.com importer works around. So in a pinch, you can download the backup file, import into a WordPress.com blog, export from the WordPress.com blog, and import into your self-hosted blog from there.

It’s a bit of a hassle, but if you’re having trouble with the importer that uses Posterous’s API (as it seems you are), it may be worth trying.

Ah, yep, that’s definitely Posterous-supplied markup. There is in fact some markup we strip out.

Deborah, we’re not adding any markup to what Posterous sends us, so I have trouble imagining you’d get anything different via the .org importer. I suppose it’s possible that if you edited any of the posts, the tinymce editor added some weird stuff, though I wouldn’t really expect that to be the case. Posterous CSS classes we obviously didn’t add. ??

It might be interesting to look at the markup on Posterous itself and via the API to see what they send.

I’d guess it’s skipping because you’ve already imported the posts in question. The importer tries not to redo previously imported posts (even if they’re in the trash).

If you’ve got a successful import on wpcom, maybe it’d be simplest just to export a WXR from there?

Weird, I’ve never run into that one for the Posterous importer. I wonder if there’s something weird with the post type you’re using.

The media plugin inserts the gallery shortcode for posts with images, which in conjunction with the GPP slideshow plugin is what’s causing the galleries. You could just comment out that bit of code in the plugin if you want to skip it.

You could possibly avoid the memory issue by increasing memory available to php. I suppose it’s possible that this’d resolve the empty posts issue, though it honestly doesn’t sound to me like it’d be related (I’d expect in the case of a memory limit that posts would import to a point and then stop, but not that post content wouldn’t come in).