Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - RSS Feed to dasBlog Content Converter

« Windows XPSP2 RC2 on the TabletPC doesn'... | Main | How do I automatically size (autosize) C... »

RSS Feed to dasBlog Content Converter

Posted 2004-06-17 02:29 PM in ASP.NET | DasBlog | Nant | XML | Tools.

Greg Hughes once had a LiveJournal Blog and the only remnant of his blog was an RSS Feed/Archive. Now that he runs dasBlog he wanted to move his old content foward into dasBlog. So, we googled a bit and couldn't find a tool that would take an RSS (2.0) feed as input and put the entries into dasBlog.

So we made one over lunch, and here it is: RSStoDasBlog.zip (219.29 KB)

RSStoDasBlog.exe MyRssFile.xml "C:\documents and settings\whatever\dasblog\content"

Use it like this by pointing it to the RSS file and your (local) dasBlog content folder. It will create all the needed dayentry.xml files for you to upload to your remote blog. It will also (I think) take an http:// url to an RSS file and could be used to (possible as a service?) steal RSS and mirror them in dasBlog. Thanks to Jerry (Chris) Maguire's RSS Framework that showed up first in Google and saved me the time of running XSD.exe on an RSS XML schema. Apparently he has even newer stuff on his site. It's got a few more moving parts than I think it needs to, but it did the job with a few changes that I marked with my initials; SDH.

Tracked by:
http://www.greghughes.net/rant/PermaLink,guid,bc0f9196-5f1c-4276-ae3d-6edc198c36... [Pingback]
"Conversion Done... so far, so good." (Jeff Donnici) [Trackback]
http://jeff.donnici.com/PermaLink,guid,f782a7b4-ae22-4213-afe3-3925daca1300.aspx [Pingback]

Saturday, June 19, 2004 9:22:23 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

This is cool!
I've noticed it doesn't deal with comments, which is a shame. Copying the old blogX files over to dasblog works fine as well it seems - aside from the comments !

The number of comments show up, but cannot be viewed. I don't have the source for dasBlog right now, but its looking for the (and storing new) comments in the previous days xxxx-xx-xx-dayextra.xml file - which is odd.

I'll have to either grab the source for dasBlog and try to figure out why, or maybe hack around with your converter to snag comments (although I've not looked at the source for that either yet - I'm not sure grabbing them is a simple task!)

Ian

Tuesday, November 22, 2005 11:40:05 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Have you (or anyone) tried this with Typepad content. Typepad gives you RSS content in .RDF format (with elements such as RDF which your RSS XSD doesn't accept). It will also give you an Atom feed. I can probably change the code to handle this but I thought I would check if there are other options.