Improving Blog Portability

time to read 2 min | 251 words

This caught my eye, and I wanted to comment. This post is talking about my recent move and my use of BlogML, and it included this statement:

like always there is no problem with BlogML and the main stage is the easiest one!

I am a developer, if BlogML wasn't around, I would have read the XML and issues SQL commands, it is not much harder, after all. Considerring that I had to literally tweak the BlogML exporter for DasBlog to make it work, it may have been easier that route.

The main stage was actually not the transfer of data from one blog to the next. It was actually making the second blog accept it correctly. Such things as cleaning up some posts so SubText can accept them, or ensuring that it is in the correct order, etc. I accept that there isn't much that can be done by BlogML here to make it work better.

However, one thing that I spend quite a bit of time on is the mapping of old URLs to new ones. That is a big issue for me, and anyone that change their blogging engine but keeping their blog in the same place (hm, that may be only me, actually...).