I’ve done it. After a good 5 years on the venerable blogspot.com, I have cut the cord, jumped the gun, and moved away from blogger.

It wasn’t easy.

Blogger doesn’t have an export function. There is no big red button to press that can gracefully back-up your blog. No sirree. There are some rather convoluted procedures. But what’s worse, with the new version of Blogger (to which I switched over without thinking), the convoluted procedures to back-up your site does not work.

I was pulling my hair out. I ended up writing a python script (blogger_extracter.zip) that will scrape the actual web-site, and pull-out all the html files of each individual entry. That’s the only way to do it if you want to keep the comments.

Run “python fetch_blogger.py http://yourblog.blogspot.com” making sure that you’ve got monthly archives on the front page. The script will make a directory “yourblog.blogspot.com” with the html files of all your individual entries.

Then I wrote another script blogger2movabletype.py that converts the html files into MovableType text file format. With that, I can import all my blogger posts into pretty much any blogging software out there. This one may not work on your blog unless you have the same template files as mine. But it’s a short script and you can hack at it.

The reason why I switched is that, after years of squatting on servers of the scientific laboratories that I’ve worked in, I finally got embarassed with not having my own personal server. A dominion on which I could reign supreme without typing out ridiculous url’s such as dillgroup.ucsf.edu/~bosco. So I bought
boscoh.com.

I used to hand-code html files. But that’s stupid. There’s plenty of great and free software to handle web-sites. In the process, I tried Movable Type, Word Press, Pivot, NewsBruiser – most of them had a wonderful set of features, but I wasn’t satisfied.

Finally, I came across TextPattern. And as soon as I loaded up the Admin page, I fell in love. This was the first blogging/content-management software that was manifestly designed, by a force-ful intelligent, and gifted designer. It had a beautiful, sparse aesthetic, and it was pleasantly missing the design-by-committee look that some of the other packages had. So here I am. I am looking forward to working here.

starter credit on 01/04 said: