Fallow

This blog has been fallow for some time. I’m getting back into the game by using blogger as a publishing tool. Despite warnings all around me, I’m a google junky. It’s my homepage (of course), I forward all my email to my gmail account, I always make sure to froogle significant purchases, and now I’m using their new reader tool to keep all my favorite feeds organized. Of course, it’s nicely integrated with blogger, allowing for quick-and-easy blogging of items one finds interesting. Maybe this level of integration (plus blogger’s superior editor) will encourage more noxious ramblings from yours truly.

Then again, I think I may be more interested in blogging tools and tech than I am in blogging itself. I got all excited about moblogging once, and I never did it again.

Now I just hope the wordpress “import from blogger” script works and doesn’t wipe out my site…

Update: Well, that worked fairly well. Blogger automatically published my post to my ftp site, and the wordpress import script turned it into a normal post. The import script is idempotent, too; it was smart enough running it a second time to skip over already-imported posts.

Unfortunately, the import script wasn’t smart enough to update the post after I had updated it on blogger. This isn’t surprising; the script was created to handle transitioning a blogger.com blog to a wordpress blog, not as a tool for using blogger as a wordpress publishing tool. Time to try out my PHP skills and see if I can get that to work.

Additionally, in order for this setup to really work the way I want it, the improt process would have to be automated. Currently, after publishing to blogger, I have to then go run the import script manually. I should be able to setup a simple script that is able to recognize when the blogger import file is updated so it can then trigger the import process. Hmmm… See, I told you I enjoy the tools more than the actual content creation.

By the way, for those that are curious, I used Andy Skelton’s Modified Blogger Importing Tool (via the excellent visual tutorial) to get my blogger-to-wordpress setup configured. Awesome stuff.

Update #2: Another downside to this approach is that there’s no way to tag or categorize a blogger post (at least none that I can see) that carries over via the wordpress import. So it seems I’ll have some postprocessing to do regardless of how well I get this automated.