Essentially, there is no way to pre or post-date blog entries properly.  Oh sure, you can edit the publish date, that’s just fine, but if you use datestamps in your permalinks, it will not adjust the permalink to match the datestamp of your entry.

I’m currently missing about 18 months worth of blog entries here, due to the fact that WP doesn’t have a generic importer for CSV files, which is the format my other blog entries are in.  I tried manually copying & pasting for a few minutes, until I realized that all of my entries would have a 2008 permalink on them…not good.

So then I figured, “Okay, let me wrap this in LJ XML and use the LiveJournal importer to do it.  No dice.  The WP importer takes datestamps like <logtime>2007-09-05 15:33:02</logtime> and converts them to December 31, 1969.  Lovely.  And it creates the permalink (uneditable) with that 1969 date.  Useless.

So then I figured, “Well, my MT import worked properly, let me try using that.”, so I checked out the MT documentation for exporting, and made my own MT export file.  Again, I’m met with failure.  WP gets the date right, as in it changes the published date, but the permalink still is 2008.

I cannot believe that my 2.64 MT installation from 2003 was able to do this, yet this installation of WP cannot.  I’ve found other blogs mentioning this, but it’s not in WP’s bug trac, so it seems.  And while I’d love to dig in and fix it myself, I simply haven’t the time.  So until I can figure out what’s going on, I’m just going to have to be without all of 2007’s entries on my blog.