Google's Blogger Continues to Encourage Data Portability

You wouldn't necessarily think Google would want you to move your blog off their Blogger service, but nonetheless, the company continues to enhance the data portability of its service. Last month they move Import and Export out of their Blogger in Draft testbed, and on Friday they released a set of converters that allow you to move your blog to LiveJournal, MovableType, or Wordpress.

The Import and Export functionality was specific to Blogger sites, but the converters provides Python libraries and scripts that convert between the export formats of the above mentioned platforms.

Google goes on to say that future releases of the converters will support blogML (open XML format for blog content) as well.

The source code also includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine.

There's a discussion group (pretty empty) here. One warning from the readme file:

Note that these converters are also hosted directly on Google App Engine with the latest code checked into this projects SVN directory. The hostname for these converters uses the same name as the directories found in the src/ directory.

See:

http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/
http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/
http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/

for examples of these converters hosted on Google App Engine. Note that there is a huge caveat to using these hosted services at the moment in that there is a limit to the size of a downloaded file on appspot.com of 1 MB of data. Thus, these hosted applications should only be used for reference or for the conversion of small blog export files.