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Friday 16 January 2009

Using Blogger's new Import Blog function to import an RSS-based blog

[UPDATE: I've released the code that I referred to below as a GitHub Gist.]

I've been playing with Blogger's Import Blog feature , made available in Blogger in Draft last year.

Google explicitly state that only Blogger exported blogs are supported. Blogger exports its blogs in Atom format. I thought perhaps that I could convert an RSS feed to Atom and then import that into Blogger and thereby move some old non-Blogger blogs over to Blogger.

Alas, no joy! The Blogger Import tool is quite fussy about its Atom. For example, if you export a blog in Atom format, and then run that through an XML formatting tool and re-import, you'll find that Blogger complains about the uploaded file.

However, I've kept at it, and now have a simple script that can take an RSS feed and convert it to an Atom format that Blogger seems happy with. It's not quite there -- a few posts are silently dropped for reasons I haven't figured out yet. I'm toying with the idea of eventually releasing it. Of course, I'm not the only one .

via hissohathair.blogspot.com

7 comments:

Melissa Foster said...

I would love to hear if you figure this out.

حمد العزري said...

Thanks! I've been looking for something like to import my blog to blogger.

Hamed

Marcus Tucker said...

Did you ever release this script? I'd very much like to use it to import two old blogs into my new one...

pria said...

Thanks! its a great tips....!

m6w6 said...

Here to! Any news on this bit?

hissohathair said...

Hi all. Sorry to say I've lost this script. I've got some old backups so I'll hunt around and put it up as a git snippet if I find it.

hissohathair said...

Found the backups.

I've written a new post that links to the code I wrote all those years ago. Hope it helps someone.