Blogger to Markdown

Convert Blogger & WordPress backup blog posts to hugo compatible markdown documents

Usage: node index.js b|w <BLOGGER BACKUP XML> <OUTPUT DIR>

For Blogger imports, blog posts and comments (as seperate file <postname>-comments.md) will be created in "out" directory

node index.js b your-blogger-backup-export.xml out

For WordPress imports, blog posts and comments (as seperate file <postname>-comments.md) will be created in "out" directory

node index.js w your-wordpress-backup-export.xml out

If you want the comments to be merged in your post file itself. you can use flag m at the end. Defaults to s for seperate comments file

node index.js w your-wordpress-backup-export.xml out m

If converting from WordPress, and you have posts that do not contain HTML, you can use a paragraph-fix flag at the end.

node index.js w your-wordpress-backup-export.xml out m paragraph-fix

Installation (usual node project)

• Download or Clone this project
• cd to directory
• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run node index.js <arg...>

Notes to self

Script to convert posts from Blogger to Markdown.

• Read XML
• Parse Entries (Posts and comments) (with xpath?)
• Parse Title, Link, Created, Updated, Content, Link
• List Post & Respective comment counts
• Content to MD - pandoc?
• Parse Images, Files, Videos linked to the posts
• Create output dir
• List items that are not downloaded( or can't) along with their .md file for user to proceed

Reasons

• Wrote this to consolidate and convert my blogs under one roof.
• Plain simple workflow with hugo
• Ideas was to download associated assets (images/files) linked to post. Gave up, because it was time consuming and anyhow I need to validate the markdown with assets of converted. And I don't see benefit.
• Initial assumption was to parse with xpath but I found xml2json.js was easier
• Also thought pandoc is a overkill and turndown.js was successful, though I had to wrap empty text to md instead of html.
• I want to retain comments. Believe it or not, There were some good comments.
• Was sick and spent around ~12 hrs over 5 days in coding and testing with my blog contents over ~150 posts. And also, I find parsing oddly satisfying when it result in success. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯