Backup Live Space Blog to Blogspot

If you are a regular reader of my blog. You may have know I'm a coder that believe coding can both make a living and make my life easier. It happens again this month.

I decided to publish my blog on blogspot from this month. I found I can simply post blog on blogspot and post a copy on Live Space via email publishing. But what about my old posts? Can I backup them to blogspot as well?

That's also possible, Both Live Space and blogspot support MetaWeblog API and email publishing. So I need to write a tool to retrieve all my post from Live Space and post them to blogspot.

The first question is program language, I want to use javascript so I can share this tool by a web page! But I didn't find an easy way to send email via javascript and I finally turned to java. C# is a good choice but I feel java runtime has a better availability than .Net runtime.

The 2nd problem is get full entry list from Live Space. MS only provides the latest 20 blogs but fortunately, the blog id is very regular so I can try all possible ids.

The 3rd problem is how to post on blogspot, I can use email publish or Google Data API. I tried both and chose email solution because the API solution need Google account info. I believe it's more friendly.

The last problem is after the post is backup on blogspot, could it display the same create time as the original version on Live Space. I failed on this point. Seems that Google Blogger Data API has a bug here. So I append the timestamp on the beginning of each post. When Google fixed its bug, I can easily change them in batch.

I don't bother to backup the comments. I will write another blog on this tool for more detail.

BTW, Wish MS won't close the door to me for this blog.

Tag: MS Live Space Google blogspot MetaWeblog