Since I decided I mouthed off just a tad too much last week month on the Blogger Dev mailing list, I assigned myself a little punishment: Write a PHP script which can generate a backup for any blog, comments included, without using the API. Instead of the API you use a specific template, regenerate the entire blog and then the script processes the new archive files.
My work has ready for a little testing and I need volunteers; I asked for some on the mailing list but got–unbelievably–not a single response, so I’m posting this publicly. If you’d like to be an alpha tester, fill in the contact form.
To run the script you must have access to a server on which you can run a PHP script; probably the one on which the blog archives are stored, so I guess Blog*Spot blogs are out (but maybe not if you have PHP and the permissions are set a certain way, I haven’t looked at Blog*Spot for awhile). My blog doesn’t use comments so that part–he typed nervously–is essentially untested and so I’d love a couple of you with decent amount of posts with comments to raise your hands.
The script is fairly simple, just change a couple of variables at the top of the file to meet your setup, and the output is an XML file. It’s not ATOM format but I believe that part would be simple to change if desirable; for now I just want to see if it works for someone besides me.
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Deed.
BillSaysThis 