The Ups and the Downs of Blogger...

Losing the 1,500 or so posts from my old blog is darned annoying. I really don't want to lose them permanently. So I did some research this evening to find out if there was any way to automatically put data into my new blog, despite the fact that Blogger has no "import" feature.

And it turns out that there is way, albeit a highly geekly one. I backed up my old blog every day into a set of XML files. These files can be easily interpreted by software -- and I know how to write programs. And Blogger, bless their pointy little heads, has an "API" -- a way for programs written by geeks like me to interact with a blog. This API allows new posts to be created, and it allows comments to be tacked on -- probably the two most important things I care about. It doesn't handle images, unfortunately. But at least I could recover all that writing!

So I set to work late this afternoon, to write this little program. A couple of hours ago I finished it -- and it works! I uploaded one post, and voila! It appeared, like magic. Then I uploaded 10, and they appeared. Wow! So then I got bold, and uploaded 50 -- and only some of them appeared. Oh, oh. Something screwy going on. Worse, every attempt after that to send more posts failed, though my program got no errors.

This was really weird. I then did what software engineers always do when weird shit happens: I started researching in all the places where someone might complain about this. And sure enough, in a news group dedicated to the Blogger API, I found other users complaining about exactly this problem -- and some explanations from Google. The explanation is that in their never-ending quest to fight spam blogs (an honorable goal that I fully support), they've implemented some stuff to detect automatic posting -- especially high rates of posting to a single blog. They've set a limit of 50 posts per day -- if you go over this, they go into a blocking mode which manifests itself with exactly the symptoms I'm experiencing.

This is a real problem for me, and I've written an email to Google to explain why. In practical terms, this means I can only import 40 or so blog posts a day -- and maybe less if their software counts comments too. This could take me months to import my old blog! I can see why they're doing this, but...their very mechanical approach means that a legitimate use (which importing certainly is!) gets incorrectly tagged as something evil (spamming).

If they don't offer me some sort of solution, I'm afraid I may have to move my blog again, to another provider with a better import or API capability. WordPress is the obvious alternative choice, and I just may end up heading over there.

I sure hope I get a good answer from the folks at Google...