Migrate MSN Space

  • ballistic · Member ·

    Is it possible to transfer my MSN Space posts to my wordpress.com site?

  • matt · Staff ·

    We don’t currently have an importer for MSN Spaces, but we’ll note your interest in one.

  • ballistic · Member ·

    But I could import the RSS feed from MSN Spaces to WordPress.com, right? I’ve read in this article http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_other_blogging_software about using the “Import” tab of my WordPress administration interface (which I haven’t found) or editing the import-rss.php script on the server to point to the RSS feed. What do I have to do to edit the file? Or, since it is a free account, can’t I edit the files?

  • ballistic · Member ·

    How long will it take before an MSN Spaces importer is developed?

  • options · Member ·

    I believe that importers from ‘RSS’ and ‘Movable Type’ will be ready pretty soon, check periodically your import page on the dashboard.

    none (besides sysadmins & developers) at WP.com can edit .PHP scripts. docs you read on codex relates to WordPress software installed on your own/paid web-host only.

    despite that MSN Spaces since recently implemented a MetaWeblog API, anyway it doesn’t help to import comments programaticaly. hardly that importer which would scrape Spaces’ website (like the one for Blogger) will be made soon (if ever).

    so it’s better just to wait for an RSS importer or meanwhile try to import yourself using offline desktop weblog clients/command line utilities/scripts etc.

  • ballistic · Member ·

    Thanks a lot for the response. I just checked the import page and there is indeed a link to the RSS importer, although not yet functional. I’ll probably wait for that to be set up, but I’m interested in your offline weblog client suggestion. How could I download the MSN Spaces RSS feed to an offline client and somehow convert it to one of the formats that have an importer in WordPress? I’ve become very intrigued about this.

  • options · Member ·

    as you probably know, contents of the RSS feed is actually just a vanilla plain text of post entries marked-up by XML tags.

    hence it can be transformed by XSLT transformers or parsed into another XML format like HTML, or tagged text like MTimport which can be fed into some clients like Post2Blog (HTML) or mtsend (MTimport).

    well, it ain’t necessarily to be a script guru: MS Word/Excel (since 2K3) can do that to! they only need a valid scheme to transform.

    so, if we manage get the content of an RSS feed into offline client, the last one can send (post) it right into your any WP driven blog via XML-RPC API ==> we don’t need buit-in WP import plugins and don’t depend on them at all!

    sorry, right now, I got no easy ready-made decisions just some clues where move to.

  • options · Member ·

    as for Spaces right now:

    you may either post by post save them all into separate HTML files using a ‘Post2Blog’ (or any other client which can handle w/ MetaWeblog API, like dotPost, BlogJet et al) and then post ’em all to WP;

    or try to construct a shell script using ‘mtsend.py’ which can make it all (get/post) in batch run — the last one is also not very easy task though ;-)

  • broom9 · Member ·

    I wrote a Python script “Live Space Mover” for this. :)
    The homepage of it is
    http://blog.broom9.com/?page_id=519

    It can move posts and comments if you have privilege to upload a php file to the root directory of your blog. Or it can only move posts, e.g. for blogs on WordPress.com

  • raincoaster · Member ·

    Send an email to the staff at support at wordpress dot com and they might do an FAQ for it and give it a bit more exposure.

  • broom9 · Member ·

    Thank you. I’m trying to submit this to WordPress.org as a plugin, though it’s not a plugin technically.

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