Shafqat on Development

My blog is hosted at Typepad, which in my personal opinion takes the least time to manage than any other blog hosting service. The payment option from typepad has no Paypal support as of the time of my writing and I did not want to spend from my card. So I planned to move from typepad to self hosting. However that situation was resolved with help of typepad and I am still in Typepad,the best managed blog service.

I was planning to use BlogEngine.NET, a .NET based blogging platform to host and it supports importing from BlogML. Typepad is a blog hosting service that is based on MovableType blogging platform. MovableType exports blog contents into a plain text based format. I searched around the internet for a tool that converts typepad format to BlogML. Unfortunately there was none. So I had to write a converter to convert the typepad format.

Gotcha!

After converting the the blog content to BlogML I just found out that there is a click once installer that comes with BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 and the application do not start. After a little investigation I had figured that the location of the installer is no longer valid. I then had to add support to directly import into BlogEngine by calling their webservice. So if you are converting the typepad blog exported please use the code below.

Download, Source and Usage

Download Typepad2BlogMLBinary
Download Typepad2BlogML

Usage: Typepad2BlogML.exe -i:[input file] -mode:[blogml|service] -o:[output file] -s:[service address] -u:[username] -p:[password]

There are 2 application modes, one for converting into BlogML and another for uploading to BlogEngine via a webservice.

For converting to blog ML you should use something like this:

Typepad2BlogML.exe -i:mytypepadfile.txt -m:blogml -o:out.blogml

For importing into BlogEngine 1.4.5 use command line code like this:

Typepad2BlogML.exe -i:mytypepadfile.txt -m:service -s:http://www.myblog.com/api/BlogImporter.asmx -u:username -p:password