Google offers help transplanting your blog

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google's own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.

That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google's own service--but also to move off it.

Of course, you'll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.

Future versions of the technology will support the BlogML data format and a mechanism to synchronize blogs with services that have an API (application programming interface) for accessing data but not import-export abilities.

Read More...

Google Blog Converters 1.0 Released

Blog authors around the world, Google would like to remind you that it's your blog, your data. Now that Blogger allows users the ability to export all contents of their blog, the Data Liberation team would like to announce the Google Blog Converters project. 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.

We're excited to provide this level of control for your personal blog data. Contributions to the project are always welcomed and encouraged, so check out our source code (download, 2.7 MB zipped) and let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback in our discussion group.

Read More..