Ask HN: A webmaster “transfers” thousands of articles to a new host manually | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A webmaster “transfers” thousands of articles to a new host manually

1 point_3ruj3 comments

one-by-one, as described by the said "administrator" (the quoted terms are mine).

A certain (commercial) blog, mainly run by one person was at one point transferred to a new host (wix.com, I don't know the original host) and the writer stated something along the lines:

> We will eventually transfer all the ~2500 blog posts to the new hosts, but according to the web developer the transfer will take some time since all have to be moved over manually.

Can this scenario ever showcase nothing but pure incompetence? If they can "transfer" the content in the first place, I assume that the task is entirely trivial and a loop could be created in minutes by someone with Javascript or Selenium experience...

This sounds like an alternative form of "Is JavaScript or Python better for web scraping?" (Personally I use C# for that but I digress.)

Without being familiar with the setup of the egress server and whether there's an API for posting things to Wix I suspect the answer is "It's almost certainly possible"... hopefully someone with experience in Wix can chime in with some suggestions? The way I would personally look at doing it is making a web scraper that pulls from the existing site, extracts the data for posting to Wix, and hopefully there's a programmatic way to get it up to Wix. If not... I would at least scrape into a format that makes copying and pasting one-by-one as fast as possible.

Did/Does Wix have an importer for the given source system? If not, my gut tells me your assumption that this is trivial and could easily be done via selenium is wildly optimistic.

In fact, I would hazard a guess that if selenium is involved in any way, that solution is a mistake.

Just as a worst case hypothetical, what if each of those blog posts was static HTML generated by hand?

The web developer might be very competent, but choose to use the word "manually" to support a higher cost proposal for the project.

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