Friday, 9 January 2009

Import blogs from another service to Blogger with the Google Blog Converters Project

A few months back, Blogger announced the ability to import and export Blogger hosted blogs. At the time, it was not possible to import blogs from any other service to Blogger, which left many of us a little disappointed though wondering when this service could be made available.



Well it seems there is hope that Blogger can make such a service available through our Blogger dashboards soon enough! Today the Google Code blog announced the Google Blog Converters project: an open source project which aims to make available the ability to import/export feeds from many different blog platforms:



This new Open Source project provides the ability to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. This initial release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress.



In addition, the source code includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine. Future additions to the project will include support for BlogML and synchronization tools between various services that do not provide a import/export feature but do provide APIs for accessing and modifying blog contents.


At present, the scripts provided by the Blog Converters Project are not so user friendly for those unfamiliar with scripting languages (though I hope those of you fluent in Python or familiar with the Google App engine may be able to make significantly more progress than I have!).



Instead, you may be better advised to check out these existing online projects if you need to convert a blog from another host over to your Blogger blog:



I look forward to seeing how this progresses and hope we can expect to see an official Blogger application in the near future enabling us to import directly from our Blogger dashboards!



Please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions about this project below.

No comments:

Post a Comment