Google Unveils The Open-Source Blog Converters Project

Back on September 9th 2008, I published an article here on Performancing asking the question How Portable Is Your Blog? In the article, I discussed how great it would be if there was some sort of standard for allowing users to pick up their blog data and take it with them anywhere they go. The complexities involved though with each publishing platform seemingly doing things a different way has been a major roadblock towards this ever happening.

Fast forward to today and it looks like Google is going to grab the bull by the horns with their Blog Converters project.

This project contains a number of converters to and from different Blog services. The code is written in Python with scripts to execute the conversions either on the command-line, through a Windows batch script, or hosted on Google App Engine.

So far, the project has three different converters available for WordPress to Blogger, Blogger to WordPress, and Live Journal to Blogger. Not surprisingly, creating exporters so users can easily switch to Blogger are the first ones out of the bag but the great news is that Google has released the project under the Apache license. It’s open source which means people can add or modify the source code without any repercussions.

I’m pretty stoked about this project and as more converters are created, I’ll mention them here.

Are you looking to convert either from or to Blogger? What type of conversions are you most interested in seeing?

6 thoughts on “Google Unveils The Open-Source Blog Converters Project

  1. Google hasn’t posted about this on ANY of their official blogs that I can find. It seems to have been posted here: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-blog-converters-10-released.html and a few dozen or so other bloggers picked it up from there, but as best as I can tell, google-opensource.blogspot.com is NOT an official google blog.

    I seriously doubt Google would ever release a product without posting something about it to one of their official blogs.

  2. Well then, if that is the case, this story was misreported in a hell of alot of places. Thanks for the correction though.

  3. Not sure if this is relevant but what I’m looking for is a way to publish wordpress to an ftp, if anyone out there knows of a plugin for this please let me know!

  4. Just a heads up – this isn’t a Google project, its just a project hosted on the Google Code site created by a Google user named ‘jlueck’. Google itself has nothing to do with the development of this application.

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