BlogML is an XML format for storing the entire content of a blog. You can use BlogML as a way to archive the contents of blogs or to act as a standard format for transferring content from one blog to another - this could include migrating a blog from one blogging engine to another.
To create a BlogML archive, you must:
- have a blog engine that can export to BlogML, as core feature or with an external plugin
- the latest version of your blogging engine or the export plugin must be installed on your server
If your blog doesn't comply with the 2 requirements above you cannot export to BlogML.
At the moment BlogML is supported only by:
- Community Server
- DasBlog
- Subtext
- SingleUserBlog
- Windows Live Space
- WordPress
- Blogger
Last week a friend of mine asked if I knew a way to move all his posts from his current blog (hosted on .Text on a server where he doesn't have access on) to Subtext. At first I said that he was stuck on his hold blog, but seemed to me an unfair answer, so I decided to help him and I started working on a tool that can take any RSS feed, and convert it to BlogML: Rss2BlogML was born.
Rss2BlogML is desktop tool that downloads any RSS feed, downloads the comment RSS (if provided), and then put everything inside the BlogML archive.
Since it's very rare that a blog engine can give you all the post in just one single feed, Rss2Blog allow you to specify many RSS feeds to download and merge: during this process you can also specify one (or more) feed per category just in case your blogging engine doesn't embed categories information inside the main feed.
Here you can see the main window of Rss2BlogML:
you can enter any number of RSS feed, and you can specify the category of the posts contained in the feed. And you can also check the "main feed" flag to use the feed as the one that contains the information about the blog (like title, description, author).
On the right bottom corner of the grid there is a drop-down list with the RSS dialects supported and you can choose from to generate the BlogML archive.
At the moment I tested only with .Text and with the core blog module of DNN, but if you want to import RSS generated by other blog engines you can implement your own RssMapper and add it to the supported "dialects".
Unfortunately the RSS feed doesn't contain all the information need for a complete export of your posts (for example it doesn't contain the number of views, or the trackbacks received, or the extended attributes of some blog engines), but at least allow you to backup your posts and comments, which are the most important contents in a blog.