My old blogging ‘platform’ was 20six.co.uk, who were pretty reasonable for a free service and had some excellent community building features such as giving other users ‘sweeties’ and tracking the latest posts in your friends’ blogs.
Unfortunately they are just about to change over to a new technology and will lose many of the great community features (allegedly); also they will break the image links (although the images themselves will apparently remain).
In order to rescue my old blog – and more to the point, Bobble’s old blog which is far bigger – I spent most of Sunday playing around with code that could archive the old blog, images and comments. I’m nearly there now, having written some code that can save the blog entries and images. Comments I will sort out tonight, and then post the code here for others to use.
A quick warning; The code is written in PHP, so you will have to install that first. Also I’ve developed it on the Mac so it might not work on Windows – I’ll try testing it tomorrow at work to iron out any windows/mac bugs.
The format that blogs are saved in is RSS – the same format that you can ‘subscribe’ to using Bloglines or applications like NetNewsWire. Some applications (e.g. NetNewsWire) understand RSS files and well as websites and you can still browse your old blog entries from the archived files.
Ultimately the aim will be to take the RSS archive and have another bit of code to import it into the new blog software that I’m running on this site (WordPress). But that’s a task for another day.
Quick bit of technical detail: I’m using PHP 4.x which was already installed on my Mac. I’m using the MetaWeblog API to get the blog entries from 20six, then downloading the images locally and changing the blog entries to point to the local images. Soon I will add comment downloading and will embed the old comments into the blog entries themselves.
If you are really lucky I might put the code onto this website so that it can do the hard work for you; I’ll give that a try later tonight as well.
technorati tags: php, metaweblog, xmlrpc, rss, xml
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. Add Comment Feed to Bloglines. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Powered by WordPress with Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez, modified by bubb.
Entries and comments feeds.
Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^
[...] As discussed yesterday, Here’s the (mostly) finished script. [...]
Pingback by technobubble.info » 20six blog downloader script — 16 January 2006 #
[...] Â Anyway, I’m now attempting to set up this site in WordPress. With the use of this tool http://technobubble.info/2006/01/16/backing-up-from-20six/Â I had already backed up from 20six, and I hope I can reload the archives into this. Other backup methods included backstreet browser, which took a mirror of the site, and even outputting the site to large PDF files which preserved the look of the old place. If this is successful I’ll try to get Owen and Helen set up on the same server (bluehost.com). [...]
Pingback by Adam’s Blog » Blog Archive » Nearly there. — 14 July 2006 #