zsombor's lair

After running on Blogger for years I decided it is time to get a more customizable blog engine. I’ve need to post code examples without going trough all the hoops. Syntax highlighting would be nice, having real code to hack on the backend would be nice. Textile would be also nice, instead of trying to live with a rich text editor that is clumsy as all such contractions are. Now don’t get me wrong Blogger as a generic platform was great and and I’ve highly recommend it as a generic no-fuss publishing system.

The conversion was a fairy painful process given my previous use of Blogger had been mildly put “avantgarde”. For example for years they did not have any “tag” support and in a confused moment I’ve actually opted to have Technorati style tags like:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ruby" rel="tag">ruby</a>

embedded in the post body. To my defense this is a fairly common microformat describing tags, even if the way I’ve used it ranked very low. Linking in to a global and ever changing pool of posts, sure I was not thinking clearly at the time. To make matters worse when Blogger had released their new and shiny “Beta” interface I’ve was to lazy to go over all of my posts manually and convert them to the new “label” feature they had.

The act of importing Blogger posts was a bit tricky. Turns out that Mephisto has a set of converters only that these all assume a database access … something you lack with Blogger. So much for a generic base conversion framework, looks nice feels nice and it also assumes that you have a database. Or at least a ruby models behaving in certain way. Talk about overengineering – or just pimping up my defenses in the light of ugly code I’m about to publish here.

So here is what you need to do, first export your Blogger account. Make sure you include the comments and the post TITLE since this is missing from the help file. Then download the homepage and use my conversion script (possibly the ugliest code I’ve ever written) to populate your db. You will have to tweak the script, I’ve only wrote it as a quick hack one time hack to munge my blog. Good luck!