Saturday, September 29, 2007

LiveJournal to Blogger or Blogger to LiveJournal or to/from Wordpress blog migration tool (Blog2Blog)

Last year I built a little tool that migrated blogs from LiveJournal to Blogger. It was aptly named lj2blogger. Today is the release of version 2.5

I've recently extended it to be able to move blogs from LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress and publish to LiveJournal, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress. This means you can move your blog to a new blog name or clone it.

Time to rename the tool, subsequently, it is now called Blog2Blog. Possibly further blogging systems will be integrated in later versions.

This is now a .NET 2.0 Application.

Download Blog2Blog (2.5.0.0 updated March 9, 2009)

ATTENTION: Noted added Oct, 9, 2008
Users with trouble (0 entries downloaded/exceptions/etc) downloading blogspot.com blogs:

We've identified a bug in the latest google feeds and client libraries. (http://groups.google.com/group/bloggerDev/browse_thread/thread/6fa01659eb21b0d for deep details)

Basically as a work-around, you need to put the blogger.com feed SOURCE-API-URL. To find this you will need to view the html source of your blog and look for the string that will contain "service.post" it will contain a URL like:
"http://www.blogger.com/feeds/*blog_id_number_here*/posts/default"

That is the URL you'll need for the SOURCE-API-URL or DEST-API-URL



Recently added:
Version 2.5.0.0
* Integrated the latest GData .NET framework

Version 2.4.0.2
* Fixed regression in saving journals to disk (empty titles would crash application).Version

Version 2.3.0.1
* Fixed Blogger fetching of large journals 500 entries or greater
* Added Blogger (only) Label fetching and publishing

Version 2.2.1.0
* Publishing to Microsoft's live spaces.
* Fetching from and publishing to WordPress.
* Delete All for Wordpress, LiveJournal, Blogger.
* Subject Title fix for Livejournal
* More description in LiveJournal errors.


You liked this application and you'd like to support its author? Feel free to donate:







There is a Blog2Blog Manual included, but the interface is relatively simple. If you are having a problem, please scan through the comments below; many users have discovered the same things and the solutions. If you don't see your problem, please post a comment and send an email to "blog2blog.support (at) gmail.com".


Blog2Blog Manual


Introduction

This tool migrates a blog from online line Blog systems. It uses the public API of LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, and Spaces to extract data and create equivalent entries in a different account.

Features
- Download Journal Entries from LiveJournal, Blogger, or Wordpress
- A simple read-only viewer of downloaded entries
- Publish Journal Entries to multiple online blogs
* upload private entries (it will make them public)
* parse entries and wrap http:// entries with HTML to make them active links
- Delete ALL entries for your destination journal (Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal supported).

Usage

The designed usage pattern is below.

Download from source Journal
First, Select a source
1. Enter username (e.g. user1).
2. Enter password (e.g. pass1).
3. Enter source-url (the URL of the blog you wish to download): http://user1.livejournal.com.
4. (optional) if necessary modify the source-api-url of your journal. This is auto-populated with a typical value.
5. Press Fetch Button.

View Entries (optional)
6. Press View Entries Button.
7. Use the Entry Number Dialog to change the entry being viewed.
8. When complete Press the upper right close window (the X).

Save Entries (optional)
1. Press Save Entries
2. Choose the filename, it is an XML file with the extension (*.B2B)
Note: once saved you can load these Entries without downloading from LiveJournal (use the Load Entries button)

Publish to Destination
Next, Select a Destination
9. Enter username (e.g. user1).
10. Enter password (e.g. pass1).
11. Enter dest-url (the URL of the blog you wish to upload): http://user1.blogspot.com.
12. (optional) if necessary modify the dest api-url of your journal. This is auto-populated with a typical value. (if you have a non-upgraded blogger blog take note; for non-upgraded blogs you will need to update the dest-api-url! To find the URL you will have to look at the page source of your journal. See below for more information)
13. (optional) select options you please; publish private entries and/or wrap http:// with html tags and/or Publish Back Dated posts.
14. Press Publish Button.
15. Select the Entries you will to publish (defaults to all entries).

Further instructions (non-upgraded Blogger blogs circa late 2006):
For non-upgraded blogs you will need to find your feed URI.
- To do this you will have to use your favorite browser and type in the URL of you blog (e.g. http://user1.blogspot.com)
- Using your browser you will need to 'View Source'. This differs slightly between browsers.
- In the source look for link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="User1 (Atom 1.0)"
- The api-url is the http:// location in the href

Additionally it is not possible to post to an old journal with a new 'google' integrated account (for those of you that have only partially upgraded all your journals). Additionally the publish dates of your livejournal won't be regarded. This is part of the API limitation.


Known issues

· The Application is not multithreaded – The UI refreshes slowly while connected to LiveJournal/Blogger.
· Does not import/export comments
· found 01/02/2007 - defaults for api-url only work with upgraded blogs.
· There are occasional connection problems with the XMLRPC interface to livejournal, but immediately retrying Fetch from Livejournal seems to connect successfully. Just try a couple of times. No harm should be done.


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