Eadwine Rose, if you don't use Conky Manager to manage your conkies, you don't have to bother with any conversion from 1.9 to 1.10.
To explain male's explanation (heh!):
1. the version of conky used
since MX15 has been conky 1.10 all this while. It is only that Conky Manager was installed by default from MX17. From conky 1.10, a different syntax was introduced for the instruction lines within individual conky config files. The old style/syntax is the one most of us are more familiar with, and was the default up to conky 1.9
2. HOWEVER conky 1.10 can read and
convert run old 1.9 syntax config files. There are edge cases that may not convert well, but from male's explanation, they won't affect the simple conkies I use. The difference is not a big deal if your conkies don't rely a lot on lua scripts to draw circles and lines and frames.
3. the only issue is if you use Conky Manager to
list and manage your various conkies, because the dev for CM only made it detect and recognise old syntax config files as conkies to be listed within CM. This doesn't affect the usability of new syntax conkies themselves; they just cannot be seen from within CM and thus you can't enable or disable them from within.
4. But if you don't use CM at all and instead start your conkies manually from terminal or with some script, then the difference in syntax should not suddenly be affecting your conkies.
So I don't know what's wrong with your stuff but surely it can't be the syntax issue?
[ADDED] however, male is probably asking you to convert the old syntax file to new syntax so it's easier to compare and troubleshoot against the original scripts from TeoBigusGeekus, the weather conky man.
I don't have any issue with the conkies male has provided, whether in MX15, 16 or 17. In MX15/16, I manually manage them and in MX17, they are managed from CM. I can't recall if they were old syntax configs all the way, or were new syntax which I converted to old syntax so I could see them in CM.