Just as the title describes I managed to import all of the old WordPress articles in to the new WordPress blog! This is great news because Google had been annoying me with emails about how I was missing the articles. They must have been really popular!
How Did I Do It ???
All I had from the previous blog was a MySQL dump of the database. This made it a little difficult because I couldn’t see a visual reference of the old blog. I ended up importing the old database dump in to a new database on the same MySQL database server.
After that I wrote a custom PHP script which connected to the old database (made from the dump) that then selected any published posts and looped through to gather their categories and tags then inserted them in to the new blog’s database. I think it went pretty well!
If I get some requests for it I can post my PHP script on Github but I think there are probably more useful tools out there for backing up and exporting a WordPress blog it was just quick and easy for me to make a script. I highly recommend using the explicit Export and Import feature already built in to WordPress