Moving a blog from LiveSpaces to DasBlog

I knew that moving my blog from Live Spaces to another blogging platform would be painful… And it was.

Live Spaces is a popular (not quite in the US) blogging, photo sharing website but when you are a developer you want more control. So from time to time I put on my “someday” tasks list : “get a real blog system”. You can easily share your feed with RSS but when it comes to exporting your data, there are few actual tools. I’ve tried BlogBackupOnline : it’s useful to save entries but not to export them. Here are the steps I’ve followed this week (yes, a week… ) :

• Found this Python script to get ALL entries from a Live Spaces blog. The script reads all links to entries in your blog and exports categories, bodies, comments and trackbacks. Your blog needs to have the date in the header of the entry. Here’s an example of the command line : python live-space-mover.py -s http://matthieu.spaces.live.com/ -t “%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p
• The previous script generates a WordPress export file. In order to import this file in DasBlog, you need a third file : a BlogML file. Robert McLaws provides a modified version of the export.php from the official distribution that will export the WordPress blog to BlogML.
• Now you have a BlogML and you can use this tool from TAM TAM weblogs to generate the XML files used by DasBlog as a storage system.

To sum up the process : you have to go from Live Spaces to WordPress to BlogML to DasBlog ! Some content can be discarded during the process in older entries due to some specific markups in Live Spaces.

The current theme was adapted from one found on Open Source Web Design and the colors come from COLOURlovers. The banner picture is a personal photo taken at Ground Zero (New York), in the temporary building of the subway station in April 2004. The text in the background is a quotation from Arthur C. Clarke : “If a man can live in New York, he can live anywhere”.