Google Blog Converters Project Simplifies Platform Migrations

Posted by Peter Hagopian, Jan 14, 2009 10:47 PM

Content migration can be one of the more technically challenging tasks facing administrators, whether you're running a complex site with thousands of articles or a simple blog with a handful of posts. Hoping to ease the pain a bit for the latter, Google recently introduced the Google Blog Converters project, which features tools intended to make migrations easier to and from a number of popular blogging and content management platforms.

Currently the tools support content migration to and from WordPress, MovableType, LiveJournal, and Google's own Blogger platform. The Data Liberation Front team at Google also announced that the scripts could now be run on Google App Engine. From their post on the Google open-source blog:

In addition, the source code includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine. Future additions to the project will include support for BlogML and synchronization tools between various services that do not provide an import/export feature but do provide APIs for accessing and modifying blog contents.

Having read with interest about some of the challenges that the folks at Enter Content Here faced when moving from Blogger to WordPress late last year, I'd be interested in seeing how their migration would work with these new tools.

It's not often that you see a company offer up tools that make it easier to move off of their platform, but to paraphrase their post, your blog is your data. This, of course, isn't the only way to move your data -- many content management systems offer modules specifically for importing data from other platforms -- but this is the first time that I've seen so many options in one place. It's a bit of a Swiss Army knife approach to content migration, and I think it will be very well received by the blogging and content management communities.

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