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.
Well, anything that gets you rambling, noxiously or otherwise, is decidedly a Good Thing in my book.
But the setup you describe just hurts my head. Remind me what’s so difficult about WordPress again?
Nothing’s wrong with wordpress. But Google and its suite of applications are omnipresent, well integrated, and ever-growing. Being able to blog about something with blogger while on some Google-powered app (like Reader or Picasa) is fast and easy. And if I can then set it up such that those blogger entries find their way into my wordpress blog, all the cooler.
Also, the blogger editor is slightly more palatable to my tastes.
Plus, I’m a geek. This head-hurting setup is just the type of exercise I get my jollies from. The fact that I can potentially get blogger and wordpress working together seamlessly, where such functionality was not intended or planned for, soothes the code monkey inside of me…
I tend to preger Google tools myself, but I didn’t care for the Google reader.
I’ve also noticed more spam getting through my gmail account lately.
Where is “Andy’s Modified Blogger Importing Tool”
I go to that link but i couldn’t find it to unzip it
may you please e-mail me your guide to the file?