20 July 2008

Migrating from Live Spaces to Blogger

I was really hoping that I would find an easy, no-mess solution to migrate my Live Spaces blog to Blogger. Unfortunately, my extensive searches yielded no easy answer.

So, the process had to become a multistep process.

First, I needed to export all my posts from Live to XML. The only tool I found that could do this successfully was the Live Space Mover tool. The snag is, however, that this tool exports the blog entries into a Wordpress-compatible XML file, which is not entirely compatible with Blogger.

To do the export, it is vitally important that you follow the instructions on that page. Install Python, and then extract the code files into one location. Once you have extracted the code files, run the following command from the command line:

c:\<python install directory>\python live-space-mover.py -s http:// blogname .spaces. live. com

(be sure to remove the spaces from the blog address)

If you do not add the python install directory into this line, and you have not added the Python executables to your paths, you will receive the following error:

'python' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

So, needless to say, the next step was to import the entries into Wordpress. I simply deleted the existing entries (that have already been migrated here), and imported the new entries from the XML file into Wordpress.

The last step was easy enough. I used Blog2Blog again, like I did with the original Wordpress blog. I had more than 50 entries in this blog, so again, I had to do them in batches.

Note: if you have set up a custom feed on your Blogger blog
(such as through Feedburner), you may have some issues posting to blogger using
Blog2Blog. I had to remove the custom feed info before it would allow me to
post.

I understand why the blogging platforms make it so hard to move from one to another – customer retention. But, since there is such a demand for it, one would think more tools would be available. I guess these tools only become available when a code-junkie has the need, and typically, they are not the type to move often.

This now means that this blog will contain a lot more technical information than it did in the past, along with all my political ranting and random thoughts. It makes it a little easier for me to keep track of games, tech stuff and all the other aspects of my life that doesn’t fit in with my writing blog (which is also the blog that has, until recently, received the most attention from me).

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