Saturday, March 15, 2008

Mirroring blog entries from Blogger to LiveJournal

I've gotten a few questions on how I'm using Blogger while having posts mirrored to LiveJournal. The magic is a little Python script I wrote, which I've sanitized (that is, I got rid of my hard-coded and tossed up here.

It's not for the faint of heart in its current form. You'll need:

  • A Unix-ish computer. MacOS X is probably sufficient, but I don't have a Mac to test it on. Sorry, porting this to Windows is just too much effort.
  • Python 2.5.
  • The GData API for Python.

You'll probably want to install it as a cron job. My crontab runs this every 15 minutes:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/15 * * * * /home/dacut/bin/blogger2lj.py

Why would you want to do this? In my case, I'm getting weary of the goings-on with the suits over in LJ land, but still have a bunch of folks who read the version over there. I guess we got settled in before LJ became the platform for emo tweens. Heh, live and learn.

Anyway, I'm not saying that others should move to a new blogging platform. This just gives you the option to move without having to cut ties with your existing social circle. Could you imagine what real life would be like if decisions like this dictated your social circle? "Bob, Linda, Jake: It's been great hanging out with you guys, and I'm going to miss you. But I'm changing mobile phone companies, and the new one doesn't take phone calls from you. Sorry."

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