Migrating 3rd party blogs to Jekyll

There are 3rd party migrators avilable to migrate from Wordpress blog to Jekyll based blogs. In this post, I am going to outline simple process of migrating most 3rd party blogs to Jekyll based blogs. Most of the blog web sites support a common interface called MetaWeblog.

For example, on telligent based blogs, this can be accessed as follows:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mahuja/metablog.ashx

The RFC of this interface is given here

The metablog interface exposts a common set of methods to retrieve the blog data using XML-RPC communication.

Since this API is exposed from the Weblogs providers, programmer have to use a client-side programming model to communicate with it according to the XML-RPC protocol.

I have created and published this C# programming wrapper which allows us to easily develop C# client applications that consumes this API via a service.

  1. Download my sample wrapper from the github repository here.
  2. Create a .Net application and reference the CookComputing.XmlRpc that come in the above repository
  3. Create a class for the API provided.

Notice that the above post contains an implemention of IBlogger interface, which is decorated with [XmlRpcUrl(“http://blogs.msdn.com/metablog.ashx”)] attribute.

Don’t forget to change the URL of your Community Server Blogs metaBlog.

Now you can easily use the proxy in your code.

class Program
{
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            IBlogger proxy = MetaBlogAPIFactory.Create();
            PostInfo[] posts = proxy.getRecentPosts("mahuja", "[email protected] ", "sdfsdf", 1000);

            IJekyllFiles jekyllFiles = new JekyllFiles();

            foreach (PostInfo post in posts)
            {
                List<MappingEntry> sampleYaml=jekyllFiles.GetSampleYaml();

                List<MappingEntry> newYaml = jekyllFiles.SetYaml(post, sampleYaml);

                string filename = jekyllFiles.GenerateFileName(post);

                jekyllFiles.GenerateFileOutput(post, filename, newYaml, "description");

                Console.WriteLine("{0} written successfully", filename);
            }

            Console.ReadLine();


        }
}

To generate the YAML header for the files, I have re-used publically available YAML parser. We can choose from several available YAML parsers: