Thursday, September 10, 2009

How to import your Jroller posts into Posterous?

Well, I think I'm going to talk from the side of minority of users here, but I'm still sure that this would be interesting for somebody.

No long words for Posterous.  It's cool, it's great, it's life streaming.  As a professional bloggers you probably would not find it as a best fit, but it doesn't mean anything actually.  

Whatever, back to our problem.  I used to have an old blog running at Jroller (http://jroller.com/whiteprohorenko).  Jroller http://jroller.com is a traditional hosting site which runs Roller Weblogger http://rollerweblogger.org/project  and has a great Java developers community in and around it.

It does support MetaWeblog API, however, Posterous import was failing trying to authenticate it and never started the process.

I got back to Sachin Agarwal and was pleasantly surprised with prompt response from him (I'm getting used to that already ;).  He told me that Posterous needs RSD (Really Simple Discovery) to be there to let the process start.  

While I am not sure about how things are supposed to run on Roller Weblogger platform and on Jroller, I decided to take a simple workaround here.  

First, I create a simple rsd.xml in one of the public folders (you can choose any one, but make sure you have a direct and publicly available URL to it):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rsd version="1.0" xmlns="http://archipelago.phrasewise.com/rsd">
  <service>
    <engineName>Jroller</engineName>
    <engineLink>http://jroller.com/</engineLink>
    <homePageLink>http://www.jroller.com/whiteprohorenko</homePageLink>
    <apis>
      <api name="MetaWeblog" blogID="whiteprohorenko" preferred="true" apiLink="http://www.jroller.com/roller-services/xmlrpc" />
    </apis>

  </service>
</rsd>

whiteprohorenko here is the name of my Jroller blog.  You need to modify it to fit yours, if you don't want to import mine. ;)  However, you will also need to authenticate against it later (as far as I know).

Second, you need to tweak your Jroller blog template to include a correct meta data to point to this "fake" RSD.  You can do this from your Jroller settings.  Here how should it look like:

<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://prokhorenko.us/white/tmp/rsd.xml" />

Once again, you need to put your own link here.  Basically, that's it.  Go ahead to Posterous import page, put a link to your blog here (http://jroller.com/whiteprohorenko in my case), your username and password and go for it.

Boom!  Here it is.  You can merge your posts (as I did), and you can see old ones here at http://iwhite.posterous.com/?page=24

Have fun and enjoy Posterous.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost