blog
This is the first step of something I wanted to do for years: migrating my self-hosted blog to some hosted service.
(Don't ask why I chose Blogger over Wordpress or the like, I don't know yet. Maybe because I could use my Google account to sign in...)

Here are the reasons why I decided to discard my old b2evolution installation:
  • I am tired of the administration stuff (always upgrading to the latest patchlevel, database backups etc.)
  • There seem to be no effective way to fight spam in b2evo (every time I enabled my blog for comments, I got tons of spam)
  • Writing posts with b2evo is like coding in notepad on a 9" screen. I am missing either a rich text editor or third-party-tool support (like Live-Writer) here.
  • Embedding images or sourcecode is cumbersome (at least I found no intuitive way of doing it)

The Migration

I found a very nice and easy solution for a (AFAIK) currently unsolved problem:
  1. Export the whole blog as Atom feed
  2. Transform the exported XML file to a Blogger-compatible style
  3. Upload the new file to Blogger
Note: I do not deal with comments or images here.

Step 1: XML Export 

Go to the admin area of your block.
Change these settings on the "Blog settings" page, "Features" tab:
        Feed contents: Full post contents
        Posts in feeds: 9999
Ensure all posts have visibility "published".
Now exit to your blog, right-click the "Atom: Posts" link (in my case, the URL is http://bxm.at/blogs/java/?tempskin=_atom) and save the link as file (e.g. "b2evo.xml")


Step 2: XML Transformation

Not really a tranformation, but a bunch of cut-past-operations. Let's start with opening the "b2evo.xml" file in your favourite text editor:
  1. Replace the first two lines (i.e. the "xml" and "feed" tags) with the following:
  2. Replace the "generator" tag with
  3. Each "category" tag needs an additional "scheme" attribute:
  4. Within each "entry" tag, add an additional category:
...now the XML file should have valid Blogger syntax!

You may also want to make some cosmetical changes, like removing blank lines or replacing codeblocks with a syntax highlighter.

Step 3: Blogger Import

This is the easiest part:
In the Blogger admin area of your blog, select "Settings" > "Other" > "Import blog" and upload the XML file. Now select all imported blog entries and publish them.

One final note:

As you see, this blog is currently empty. This is because - before publishing - I want to deal with the "cosmetical changes" part mentioned above...