Jason Silver

Sunday, September 11th, 2005

BlindDate Script

No, not another dating script. Not too interested in that, though I'd probably make a lot of money from it. :-)

BlindDate is a script for transfering files from one server to another server, via FTP, while maintaining file dates.

For people who use Blosxom, the thought if moving blogs to a new server is quite daunting. This is because all the blogs are dated based on when the text file which they originate from was last changed. So moving to a new server gives these files a date of 'now,' whenever you copied them. Suddenly you have no archives... all your blogs were written today! Not good.

Some FTP servers can deal with this, maintaining the file dates as each file is uploaded. Others cannot. For those who use a web host with limited servers, my little program comes to the rescue.

How did I make this work? First, I wrote a spider program which traverses all of the files in the old server, and notes their dates. It saves all these file names, directories, and the date to a file. We upload this file to the new server. Then the spider goes to work on the new server, applying all of these date changes to each file.

Pretty cool, eh?

I decided to give it away for free, and it can be found at www.intelliscript.net.

~Jason