This project involved the rescue and archiving of 3 very old blogs and the re-creation of an old website that had long lingered in relative obscurity.
The focus in this project was not on design, but on importing and converting thousands of blog entries from various sources and online communities, some dating back to the mid 90s, and preserving some of the of metadata, like titles and dates and author, while discarding junk markup that had accumulated because of obsolete blogging practices.
With the help of a programmer we stripped useless markup from thousands of entries that had been harvested and organized, while at the same time adding markup to dates and titles that should be preserved.
Through many hours of testing and trying out scripts we finally arrived on a way that worked for most of the entries. I used the Import html pages plugin to import batches of files into WordPress.
Two of the blogs are now archived, but two others are live and have commenting enabled. The subscribers of old blogging communities were imported and updated to the new WordPress format.