Blogger import development

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Blogger import development

These are my notes for bringing my Blogger entries into Radio, and eventually bringing my older, html posts, into Radio as well. I'm taking notes here as I do things, so I don't recommend trying to use anything you find on this page as it may destroy data. It is important to note that everything I am doing, I am doing with backup copies of my data.

Aaron's stuff is here

Dave is taking notes here

Dave recommends using Spec for Frontier tables in XML. An example of this is here.

From the blogger output tag reference:

* <$BlogItemBody$> - The text of a post.
* <$BlogItemAuthor$> - The author of a post.
* <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> - The nickname of the author of a post.
* <$BlogItemAuthorEmail$> - The email address of the author of a post.
* <$BlogItemAuthorURL$> - The homepage URL of the author of a post.
* <$BlogItemDateTime$> - The Date and/or Time of a post. You can choose how this will display in Blog properties.
* <$BlogItemNumber$> - The unique ID number of the post.
* <$BlogItemURL$> - The URL associated with the post if you have URL enabled.

I may need to tweak the date settings to get the date object that Radio is expecting. (Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:20:36 GMT")

Managing you Blog with Blogger, XML, and ASP

Okay I got my posts out of blogger marked up as follows:

You need to make sure that you have chosen the first date option in the settings screen. (MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss am/pm)

I, of course, managed to munge my site while doing this by not being careful enough with the settings. You should be careful. I went back in and switched everything back to normal and republished my site.

I'm still not sure how date coercion will need to be done.

Took a break for lunch.

Okay so the easy part is complete. I'll probably go back at some point and add the entries from the previous time to the xml file. Now I need to use xmlTo Table to serialize the entries into my Radio workspace table.

Radio Userland: Programming Pointers

Oops, looks like I missed some things in the spec for my XML markup. The wptext entries should have head and body elements.

Used BBEdit to correct mistakes.(Script was generating a poorly formed XML error which led to my discovery.)

Attempt to serialize a test entry. Fail miserably. Realize that I need to learn Usertalk better than I know it and now is as good a time as any.

String constants can't go past a line break.

So it has to be well formed XML. This means no < or & or any other character that should be represented by an entity. So I went through all 893 posts and converted what needed to be converted. Boy, that was fun.

Script from Dave for import.

local (url = "Internet Address of exported XML file");
local (xmltext = tcp.httpreadurl (url));
table.xmltotable (xmltext)

Bump is in the ODB yo.

So, now I'm looking at pre-Blogger entries.

Okay, the process, as we did it yesterday, is not really something that a non-technical person could easily duplicate. So we're starting it over, and doing things in a manner that people will have an easier time of it.

Redid Blogger export with new format from Dave. Documented the process for later creation of documentation.

So I've got the new format out of Blogger's rendering engine. I have plans, however, for this evening, so calling it a night.

Okay, so we went a different way yesterday. The new format is real XML, using CDATA to hide the html like the Blogger how to link above recommends. The new format is as follows:

<?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "ISO-8859-1" ?> <table name = "someblogname" address="workspace.someblogname"> <Blogger> <table name = "<$BlogItemNumber$>"> <wptext name = "text"> <head /> <body><![CDATA[<$BlogItemBody$>]]></body> </wptext> <date name = "when" value= "<$BlogItemDateTime$>" /> </table> </Blogger> </table>

So I repeated the earlier steps and have a table in my workspace that contains all of the bump entries named Bump.

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