One of the reasons I like providing APIs to online services is that it gives users more control of their data. Alex Boyko, who's one of the testers on our team wrote a tool for migrating his blog from one blog service to the other using the APIs they provide. In his blog post Blog Content Transfer he wrote

Apparently, my old blogging site (Blogger) and the new one (MSN Spaces) expose some APIs that can be used to play with your content (Metaweblog API for Space and Atom API for Blogger). I spent some time over the weekend and wrote a tool that helped me to transfer my data between two sites.

In case if somebody else is excited about gleams as much as I am ;] I've decided to share a copy of BCTransfer (Blog Content Transfer).

 DOWNLOAD HERE

Please let me know if it works and especially if it does not work for your. I’ll be more than glad to help.

Please read this first. It tells your how to get a login for your space.

At this moment, it is a command-line tool written using .NET 2.0. So you need to have it installed (the easiest option for that is Windows Update). Here’s how you run it in the most basic scenario:

bctransfer -bu <old-username> -bp <old-password> -su <new-username> -sp <new-password>

Yet another reason why providing APIs for online services is a good for regular users as well as developers. Nice.


 

Thursday, 18 May 2006 12:32:30 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Not bad that you are migrating content from one blog to another, but better take care that everything is not just mingled up. And its a very useful tool if it works perfectly, though i ve nt tried yet. But yes definitely like to.
Friday, 19 May 2006 01:42:45 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Seems interesting. Reminds me of BlogML, but not sure it ever took off.
It'd be great to have the same thing for wikis ;-)
Saturday, 20 May 2006 14:36:07 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Hi Julien, BlogML is still ticking along and I wrote about a couple of new implementations just yesterday:

http://markitup.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=b4643a5d-3ec8-4f33-affb-8b4715439e44

We've now got BlogML implementations for Community Server, DasBlog, several flavors of .Text, SingleUserBlog, it's built natively into SubText and there's several other implementations such as the Squarespace one.

The home site for BlogML is currently a GotDotNet workspace:

http://BlogML.com

And I'm hosting most of the BlogML implementations there. My plan is that as soon as I ship a book that I'm authoring I want to update the site and make it more structured so that it's much easier to find a trusted BlogML implementation for whatever blog you have. I also need to publish a formal schema primer document that describes the BlogML format.
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