Politically correct - a custom spider creation
A recent request for modification of the AutoMapIt Spider engine came as a referral from my good friend BJ at KWDesign. She was creating a Custom WordPress Theme for PoliticalVine.com by Bill Simon and didn’t want to just ‘throw away’ the content on that domain by hosting it on another. The problem was that PoliticalVine was hosted on a windows machine in ASP and Bill Simon wanted to upgrade to a Linux server using PHP. With over 1500 pages being transferred, this was not a manual kind of project.
With a healthy dose of ingenuity and a can-do attitude, I modified the AutoMapIt spider to store the HTML generated by his ASP blog. One of the first hurdles I realized from this was to keep his dynamic pages linking together without breaking the links and without using the query string (after the ? in the URL) anymore.
Regular expressions to the rescue! Using the PERL compatible regular expression (PCRE) available in PHP, I was able to change his links and filenames on the fly as they were created. All of the links within his pages followed the same rules of renaming so in the end, everything matched up and the links in his pages matched the correct filename.
Converting his dynamic ASP to HTML, which is static, allowed him to move the website between servers and technologies without hindering it’s performance in any way. Once the spider was converted, his site was spidered and converted in one move within an hour or so. Once the spidering was complete, I was able to zip the files that were created and send it to him. All that he did was unzip and upload and his new pages were in place, functioning as they should.
Tags: ASP to HTML website conversion was made possible by a custom web spider from AutoMapIt. Contact AutoMapIt Support to get your quote for custom spidering today!
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January 22nd, 2006 at 1:01 am
I was going to be rather unhappy losing 3 years worth of writing material, so, this was darned cool!
Just wanted to drop by and say “Thank you!” to Shawn for converting all that ASP content to something useful on my new blog location on a Linux server.