Backing Up Blog to EF

I backed up my Blogger blog, but the only export option is a single large XML file. That won’t be much use to me in EagleFiler, unless I can convert it to HTML or Markdown, and break off each constituent posting. That sounds like quite a slog.

So…I guess the smarter approach would be to compile a complete list of blog posting URLs and give that to EF?

Any advice? FWIW I’m new to EF.

I guess it depends on what format you want to end up with.

Yes, you could try to use a regular expression (e.g. in BBEdit) or parse the ATOM XML to get all the permalinks and then paste them into EagleFiler’s Import URLs window.

I want to end up in HTML or Markdown, one posting per record.

So the way to do this is brute force - present EF with a list of thousands of URLs?

Well, then maybe you don’t want to tell EagleFiler to import the URLs because it would then use one of these formats. It sounds like you are going to want to preprocess your XML file somehow. There is probably a utility somewhere to convert an ATOM file to HTML or Markdown.

There’s no way to ask EF to grab html from a URL and save it as an html file?

I’m surprised! (and it’s ironic given that EF makes me work around non-ideal HTML format for my Evernote import!)

Correct. My thinking here was that plain HTML is not that helpful because most HTML these days doesn’t look very good without the stylesheets, images, and JavaScript files. I was a little worried about people setting this format and then being unhappy later when they realized that critical parts of a page they imported long ago were missing. It also doesn’t seem particularly more useful than the Web archive format, which does include all those resources. But if people think this would be useful I can considering adding it.

It’s really a foundational question of what EF is for, I suppose. If I’m using EF to browse recipes formerly in EV, I want front-end presentability. If I’m using EF as a bucket for source files I want to categorize, organize, and manipulate at a low level, I want back-end source.

I’m a consumer and a creator, and was hoping to use EF for both (which may be unfair!). In fact, the issue is perfectly exemplified by these two concurrent threads (in one I’m complaining about EV import being too nerdy while in the other I’m complaining about HTML import being too lightweight).

Again, I’m new here, so I’m still learning what EF is presently configured to facilitate! Thanks for your patience!

EagleFiler is happy to do both. The way I think about EagleFiler is that you can add existing files that are in any format that you want, and it also tries to help you import outside content (from the Web or another app) by converting it to as high a fidelity format as possible. For Web pages, the Web archive format is the best available because it includes everything. For Evernote, HTML + resources folder is the best standard format that Evernote knows how to export.

Both of your cases seem a bit unusual to me in that you are trying to import content that you created yourself, but you don’t have your own data in your desired format. This is not to say that EagleFiler shouldn’t try to help you with the conversion, though.

I’ve added this in EagleFiler 1.8.5 (currently in public beta).