Moved Content From Xanga

It wasn't an easy task, but I have done it.  I have moved all of my posts from Xanga (a blog that I abandoned years ago) and have brought them into Blogger.  This post will explain my process, some hurdles I have had to overcome, and the end result.

For starters, why move away from Xanga?  I don't remember why I ever started with Xanga; maybe because all of my friends had a Xanga account, maybe I just didn't care about data liberation then, I don't know.  What I do know is that none of my friends are using Xanga any more (the last post from my group of friends was April or May of 2007).  I also know that Xanga, without paying for a Premium account, will not allow you to download an archive of your content.  I am the one who wrote those posts, why shouldn't I be allowed to archive what I have written!  Here on out, I will not use a blogging platform if I cannot retrieve my own archives.  Since everything is extracted, I will be shutting down my Xanga account, probably wait 90 days or so before I do to make sure any Xanga user's who know me can see that I have moved.  I don't like having accounts open all over the web that I know longer use.  Just a pet peeve of mine I guess.

That said, a few years ago I was looking for a platform to start blogging again and since I already had a Google account with GMail, Android, and now Google+, Blogger seemed like a natural selection for me to use as a blogging platform.  Also, Google has made it very public, via the Data Liberation Front, that the user should own the data, not the platform, visit http://www.dataliberation.org/ to read more about their efforts.  So, how did I get Xanga content onto Blogger, and without spending a cent?

Tim Wylie has written a nice little tool called XWord/Xanga.r.  The program is written in rebol (being a developer of sorts myself, I haven't heard of rebol, but the tool works, so eh, what can I say), so you will need to download and install (extract) rebol on your machine.  I used a Windows machine for this and was pretty simple to do.  There is a binary executable for Windows and Linux/Mac, but those versions are outdated and I couldn't get it to work, so I think you are left with the rebol script version.

To download the xword program, go to www.timwylie.com/xword.html.  The software to run rebol can be downloaded from www.rebol.com.  Xanga.r is a command line tool, while Xword is a graphical interface for xanga.r.  Wil Fry has a post regarding his experience with xanga.r at http://wilcfry.com/blogs/verily/?p=292.  I came across his blog while researching how to export Xanga to Blogger.

Once the download is complete, simply type the url for your xanga blog and export the data.  Here comes the real tricky part.  The generated file is a RSS file for WordPress, but it cannot be imported into a WordPress.com blog; it must first be imported into a WordPress.org blog, since it requires an RSS Import.

If you visit Wordpress.org, you can download the CMS system that powers WordPress.com, but to run and "install" WordPress.org, you also need to have a web server.  I use Xampp all the time for web development stuff, which can be downloaded from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html.  Here you can also find tutorials on how to set up Xampp.  You will also need to create a MySQL database for use with WordPress.org.  Extract the WordPress.org download to htdocs in your Xampp installation directory, and if Xampp is running, you can go to localhost/wordpressdir  (where wordpressdir is the WordPress directory in htdocs) in your web browser and install WordPress.  After the install, you will find it is much like WordPress.com, except with a few more features, such as the ability to install modules (which is what we will need to do next).

Go to the Plugins section and search for the RSS Import plugin and install it (all from your WordPress.org admin dashboard).  Once the plugin is installed, you can now import an RSS to WordPress.org by selecting the option under the import tab and then choose your Xanga .xml file created with xanga.r.  After the import is complete, you can now export the WordPress.org posts to a WordPress XML file for imported to WordPress.com or any other blogging platform that will recognize this format.

Another option is to use these tools at http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/.  This project on Google AppEngine allows you to convert your blog to/from different types.  I used this to convert my WordPress XML file to a Blogger file (http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/), then imported the generated file into Blogger.

I have a non-active blog (on Blogger) that I have imported my posts to, simply to keep them separate from my posts on Blogger and as an archive of its own.  I have left those posts unpublished, so if anybody finds that blog, they won't find anything other than an empty blog (again, I did this for keeping a separate archive for now and may delete it in the future, just something I set up to make sure the import was going to work the way I expected it to).  After a verified the format of most of the posts, I then exported them, and imported them into this blog where I have published the imported entries and are now part of my current blog.

The nice thing about going through all of this work is that all of my content is now on one site, and if I move later, I can export everything and import later (such as to WordPress.com with their Blogger Format import tool).  A few things to note:
          -  If you have posts with listening/reading/watching, you may need to correct these posts.  For each of my posts that had a listening to or reading header, the post content was missing and just the header was imported.
          -  Comments are extracted from Xanga with the xanga.r script, but they were not imported to WordPress.  This required me manually importing the comments by creating a Spreadsheet in LibreOffice that matched the table columns, then saved the file as a csv.  I found using | to break columns and ^ to enclose all text worked better since some of my text contained quotation marks.  I also included column names in the first row and upon imported, simply skipped the first row.  Once the comments were imported into WordPress.org through phpmyadmin, I was able to export them and import them to other platforms just fine.

I have noticed a few minor formatting issues with importing, but that is to be expected and shouldn't be too hard to clean up.  I know this isn't a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to get your data, setting up Xampp, etc., so please feel free to comment or contact me if you are having problems getting your data out of Xanga.

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My last post from Xanga is http://kgunnit.blogspot.com/2007/04/morning-mourningpraying.html.
My first post on Blogger is http://kgunnit.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-information-and-goal.html.

You can also see all of my Xanga posts by searching for the Xanga Import label.