January 16, 2006 on 11:16 pm | In Coding | 6 Comments

As discussed yesterday, Here’s the (mostly) finished script.

It could do with being checked on Windows, I’ll do that at work tomorrow I expect.

You’ll need PHP 4.3 or above, get it from php.net. Then edit BlogBackupScript.php to have your 20six username and password, and run it!

Good luck!

Download here: blog downloader script (52Kb zip file)

Edit: Or try the brand new Windows version here: (requires .Net framework 2) Blog Downloader Windows Version 2 (47Kb zip file) – It now does everything the script version does!
Edit: The windows version of PHP can be downloaded here.

I’ve had a report of timeouts on downloading some blogs. I’ll see if there’s a fix for that. I may have to give up using the weblog API for downloading the posts and just grab the web pages directly (nuts!)

Edit: Important note for Windows

The default install of PHP seems to set up a 30 second time limit on your scripts; this means you can’t download a big blog without changing it. Fortunately it’s quite simple to do so:

1. Find your php.ini file – probably it is in C:\WINDOWS\PHP.INI – and open it in Wordpad or your favourite text editor.
2. Find the line that reads

   max_execution_time = 30

   and change the limit to be 0. This should stop the script from being shut off after 30 seconds.

3. You might also want to put a semi-colon in front of the line starting ‘memory_limit’ to turn off any memory limit.
4. Save php.ini
5. Try your script again – it should now continue downloading your blog.

A good way of checking your blog is to take the XML files and opening them in Internet Explorer or Firefox; this will report an error if the file isn’t complete.
Really big blog?

If you have over 1000 posts in your blog you also need to edit the script slightly; find the line that reads

$numposts = 1000;

and add a 0 on the end to that it will download up to 10,000 posts.