How to import text file based blog posts?

Hi,

a couple of years ago I ran a blog. I had coded the php myself. The blog system used one text file for every blog entry to store. It was some form of photoblog, even though you wouldn’t call it this way at the time. Anyway, there is one or more photos in every entry.

Now I’m trying to import these text file blog entries into my worpress blog. Ideally, the photos get uploaded in the process. (Even more ideally, one photo per entry would be assigned to the amazing YAPB, my photo blog plugin of choice.) I’ve tried two things:

• I tried to write a php script that puts out a xml file that I could import into WP. It failed. There was some problem with the encoding of chars. Umlauts like ä, ö and ü were broken.
• I tried to output the text files and photos in a html file and use firefox extensions like ScribeFire to generate new posts by selecting the content and clicking a link like “blog this”. The Problem is: images don’t get uploaded. They are simply referenced with an absolute url.

I’m close to giving up. This would either mean copying and pasting 150 entries by hand into WordPress (+ uploading the corresponding images) or not importing this stuff at all.

Unless you guys have a good idea how I can solve this?
Thanks in advance.