Vineet Gupta

I migrated my blog from Windows Live Spaces to Blogger via Wordpress in the process of resurrecting http://vineetgupta.com/.

Choice of blogging platform – the two choices were wordpress and blogger. Wordpress has a lot of plugins going for it, and supports static pages. However, I ended up choosing blogger for the following reasons:

• Everything in blogger is free. Wordpress charges for certain services which were important to me – custom domains and custom CSS
• The number of Google services I ended up using / intend to use for vineetgupta.com are quite a lot – Google Apps, Google App Engine, AdSense, Feedburner, Analytics, etc. It would be silly then to have a dependency outside the Google ecosystem, unless I was getting a tangible benefit
• The Blogger Data API shares several concepts with the GData API, thus reducing learning curve.

 

Migrating the blog contents – this was real pain and quite an adventure. To cut a long story short:

• Used Live Space Mover to pull out my posts from windows live spaces to a wordpress format file.
  
  
  • This is a python script that uses Beautiful Soup for parsing the Live Spaces content.
  • Works flawlessly – was able to import the exported file into wordpress without a hitch.
• I naively assumed that blogger would provide a way of importing from wordpress, but it does not.
  
  • There are a number of third party programs that try to make this work using Blogger’s import feature .. nothing worked for me including the famous Google Blog Convertors.
  • There is a lack of clear guidance on specifying the expected layout of the Atom stream that can be imported by Blogger. I tried multiple variations and even the simplest ones failed. I wonder if anyone has ever been able to import an atom feed to blogger, that was not exported from blogger itself.
• Frustrated with the import feature, I investigated Blogger’s Data API and stumbled upon Wordpress to Blogger – another Py script that again uses beautiful soup to parse the wordpress file and then makes posts to Blogger using the GData protocol To make this work, I had to make some changes:
  
  
  • Set datetime format = H:M everywhere
  • Modified the static date used for GMT published dates in the wordpress template
  • Finally, there was some bug in the comment publishing code, so I removed the comments from the wordpress export (by modifying Live Space Mover to not write comments).
• This worked well and I was able to start migrating posts, however Blogger imposes a 50 posts / day rate limit, so I was only able to migrate 42 posts (used 8 postings for testing and debugging). I still have about half the blog contents waiting to be migrated which I intend to do tomorrow.
  
  • Despite all this, I have not been able to migrate comments (because of the bug I mentioned above). Some amount of testing and debugging can surely fix this, but I am not sure if I would be able to spare the time.
• Feedback for Google:
  
  • Document the import Atom steam feature properly
  • Support importing from popular blogging platforms