User talk:~Dan~

Hi Dan. There's a tool that might help here. It converts HTML to MediaWiki.

For it to work, you need to view a page on archive.org, select the article part of it and then "view source" or "view HTML" which is a setting in your browser. You paste that HTML into this html2wiki tool.

The settings for the tool are:
 * Base URL for relative links = http://ppn.wikia.com/wiki/
 * URL for wiki links = http://ppn.wikia.com/
 * Wiki dialect = MediaWiki

I've put an example in the Wiki.theppn:Sandbox. You'll notice some problems, like it linking to archive.org instead of locally, but it's a quicker way of getting the content onto the wiki so that it can be fixed up later. It's also quite good at doing tables which can save a lot of time.

Angela (talk) 01:17, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I should have known someone had already made a conversion tool!

I didn't get links to archive.org when I tried it, you must have not put in the base url's for your example.

I just had to edit some stuff from the start & end that wasn't needed, and edit out the contents part as the wiki generates that itself.

A link to a page that hadn't been created yet looked like

* Ao no Honoo (2003)

when it should have been simply

* Ao no Honoo (2003)

so those needed editing. Just need to ctrl-f and search for occurrences of index.php and remove the unwanted part.

I'll leave the links to the nonexistant pictures. Someone can upload those later perhaps.

~Dan~ 02:39, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Just written out a foolproof method of converting pages that other people should be able to follow, hopefully it's in easy enough steps, lol.

1. Go to [archive.org].

2. Type a url into the box, in the form of http://wiki.theppn.org/Matsuura_Aya (separate more than one word titles with an underline not a space), and click "Take me back"

3. You'll be given a load of different dates. Click the most recent one, and if that doesn't work try the next oldest until you get a page that loads. (Sometimes a page appears to not load, but if you view source it's all there.)

4. Select view->source

5. Copy the entire page (rightclick->select all saves a lot of time here rather than dragging the mouse over the entire page as I once used to do!)

6. Go to the html2wiki tool and set these settings...
 * Base URL for relative links = http://ppn.wikia.com/wiki/
 * URL for wiki links = http://ppn.wikia.com/
 * Wiki dialect = MediaWiki

...then paste the source code in that you just copied, and click "Convert HTML to wiki markup".

7. Copy all the text in the top box (labelled "MediaWiki markup") into notepad or wordpad (or any other text editor if you prefer) (again rightclick->select all saves a lot of time)

8. There's text you don't need that needs removing from the start and end of the document. Look at the page you retrieved from archive.org as a guide to what needs removing. You'll also have to delete the contents (usually placed after the first few lines of text). You don't need the contents as wiki generates it's own contents list and if you don't delete it you'll end up with two contents lists. If in doubt leave it in because someone else can easily edit it later.

9. Before entering your text into the wiki page you need to use the search & replace feature. For notepad & wordpad it's edit->replace. You need to replace  index.php?title=  with nothing (leave the 2nd box blank, it shouldn't have anything in it, not even a space). Then replace  &action=edit  with nothing again. Although those 2 things often appear together they sometimes appear split in two (with stuff in between you need to keep), that's why you replace them seperately.

10. Then enter your text into the wiki. The image links will be broken but the pictures can be added by others later, or removed.

~Dan~ 03:41, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Those are great instructions, thanks. I also noticed that Yahoo cache has >500,000 pages from wiki.theppn.org], a lot more than google, and a lot more recent than archive.org. Angela (talk) 05:07, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, that's more up to date. You don't have to wait for the page to load, as long as it doesn't give a message that the page isn't available (as it sometimes does) you can view the source before it's rendered the page. I'm able to restore a page every 2 to 3 minutes when at full swing. Not bad! ~Dan~ 16:50, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

See the latest post on livejournal. Better close this for now until a decision is reached, as someone isn't happy. :( ~Dan~ 17:00, 9 January 2009 (UTC)