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https://github.com/otherjoel/blogger2kirby

Python script for moving Blogger blogs (with images and comments) to Kirby CMS
https://github.com/otherjoel/blogger2kirby

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Python script for moving Blogger blogs (with images and comments) to Kirby CMS

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blogger2kirby

=============



Python script for moving Blogger blogs (with images and comments) to Kirby CMS. 



Blogger allows you to export your blog as a single large XML file. My script takes this file, parses out just the blog posts and comments, and creates a folder and a text file in Markdown format for each post.



* Any images are downloaded and given a unique filename in the post's folder

* Image links are converted to Kirby format (looks like `(image: image01.jpg)`)

* Comments are appended to the end of each post, with comment author names/links and timestamps

* Tags are preserved in the post's metadata



The resulting folders can simply be dropped into the content folder of a Kirby-based site, and boom: the blog has moved.



## Requirements



The script is in Python 3. I couldn't use v2 because of problems with Unicode data.



[Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/index.html) (version 1.13.1 or later) is also required for the HTML to Markdown conversion process.



The script also requires these libraries:



* `lxml`, for parsing XML

* `BeautifulSoup`, for parsing HTML

* `python-rfc3339`, for parsing Atom timestamps in RFC3339 format () -- note, at this time Python has no native support for parsing strings in this format. There is an [open issue][oip] for this in Python's bug tracker, and the [latest comment][lcp] on that page identifies the above library as being the best one for the job.

* `requests`, for downloading images over HTTP



[oip]: http://bugs.python.org/issue15873

[lcp]: http://bugs.python.org/issue15873#msg221903



On my Mac running Yosemite, the simplest way to get all these prerequisites was to [install Homebrew](http://brew.sh), then run the following commands:



    brew install python3

    pip3 install git+https://github.com/tonyg/python-rfc3339.git

    pip3 install lxml

    pip3 install beautifulsoup4

    pip3 install requests

    

    brew install pandoc



## Usage



Place your Blogger XML file in the same folder as the script, and name it `blog.xml`. Then run `python3 blogger2kirby.py`. 



You can also run `chmod u+x blogger2kirby.py` to make it executable and then just run it as `./blogger2kirby.py`, assuming your python3 lives in `/usr/local/bin/python3` (if you installed it with Homebrew, that's where it would be).



You will see a lot of messages fly by about the posts being parsed out.



Afterwards there will be a folder named `out` in the current folder, containing a single folder for each post in the format `YYYYMMDD-post-slug` -- the slug will be the same as the filename on the post's original Blogger URI but without the `.html` -- this will allow for easy redirects.



## Acknowledgements



This is my first Python script so I'm sure it's very rough in places.



I had googled and stack-overflowed about halfway through it when I came across this gist  by Lars Kellogg-Stedman. His is much better-written, but output is formatted for some other blogging platform, and doesn't download images or attempt to retain comments. I adopted one of the markdownify functions from that script, and it was his code that put me on to the use of `lxml` instead of the included ElementTree library.



This post was very helpful in understanding the Unicode string processing problems I was encountering in Python 2: [Solving Unicode Problems in Python 2.7](http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/2014/03/solving-unicode-problems-in-python-2-7/)