Jan 01
I didn’t expect it to be a difficult task. Well, it wasn’t very difficult to do in Ruby. But it was annoying. Not because of Typo or Ruby, but because of Blogger’s crappy API and limited functionality. The following is the steps that I had to go through to make it work:
- Migrate my old Blogger account to the new one because the old one uses Blogger’s Atom 0.3 API, which is a piece of junk. It doesn’t have the creation date of the post. Therefore it’s impossible to preserve the time when the posts are created. The new Google Data API, on the other hand, has a lot more meta information in it.
- Change the Allow Blog Feed option in Blogger settings to Full. You can only specify Short or Full but not both for this setting. If you select Short, you can only get the summary in the feed.
- Now comes the most annoying part. Blogger doesn’t support Markdown so it outputs straight HTML in its feed! Some of the HTML tags caused casting of method parameters to fail when I posted to Typo using metaWeblog API. It took quite a few gsub() to replace those tags with Markdown.
In the end, I was able to migrate all the posts successfully. So Vlad, are you ready to move to Typo now?
So what is the benefit of this typo software?
Well, first it’s done using RoR, which is a technology we are getting familiar with. It’s easy to find a good hosting company for it. It supports the standard features a blogging application is supposed to support such as commen APIs other than Blogger/GData, Markdown, plug-ins, etc. It also has customizable theme and sidebar.