Archive your Posterous Blog, using httrack and Wordpress

I've decided that is time to archive my old Posterous' site, initially located at g.garron.me, to do that I've first moved it to Wordpress, a self hosted installation of Wordpress. In order to achieve that, I've previously imported it into a new wordpress.com blog, as the plugin to import Posterous, does not work in a self hosted Wordpress. Once imported in wordpress.com, I've exported it, and then finally imported into my self-hosted Wordpress.

I changed the permalink structure to recreate how them look in Posterous. You can read more details at Migrating from Posterous to Wordpress.

Once you have your blog running in Wordpress, you can install your favorite theme, maybe add some SEO plugin, add some pages, edit some posts or any other change you want before archiving it. I've decided to keep it running in Wordpress for a while before archiving it, just to make sure everything is running the way I want.

When you are ready to archive it, use httrack to help you. The command I've tested, and so far is working as expected in a test environment is:

httrack "http://blogs.garron.me" -O "./blogs.garron.me" -v '-*logout*' '-*edit*' '-*user*' '-*feed*'

This command will archive all pages and posts, but will not import urls with: logout, edit, user or feed in them, those links are only useful in a dynamic site, and this is going to be a static one.

Once archived, just point your webserver to those files instead of Wordpress installation folder.

Be sure to test everything before you forget about it, and keep a backup of your database in case you would like to change something in the future. It would also be a good idea to keep a backup of your wordpress installation files, in case the version available in the future does not support your Database structure anymore.