since the bloggerAPI is lacking the very important feature of returning all post ids of a certain user, i had to apply various tricks to achieve my goal of an easy way to import blogger data.

i did not want to make the fellow bloggers to take the detour of an xml template, configuring blogger to publish to a certain space and then letting antville read in the xml and turn it into stories.

that's why in a first step the renderer html data is parsed for a pattern which contains a marker for the post id. ie. this should be a pattern derived from a permalink of the posting or the like. don't use too trivial patterns or errors might occur, resp. the import won't work.

if the test result is positive (ie. you get a "select files" button - if not, go back and give it another trial with a different pattern or a corrected password etc.) you can determine which files you want to import. any item in the file matching the pattern will be read via bloggerAPI, then.

if you choose all or many of the files (i know there's some gui missing, yet), the import will be done in steps each consisting of 10 files. this is because i am using the scheduler to finally import the data. i was afraid exceeding the cache or the like when doing a 1000 of stories all at once.

you can peek at the import progress when you return to /import. all imports are listed here and the ones that are processed cannot be edited or deleted. instead they show a status like "processing file x of y".

in the end you should read "successfully imported" and see the result at your antville main page... hopefully.

please note that currently all postings of your blogger weblog will be assigned to the user that issues the import process. ie. good for personal weblogs, not so good for collaborative ones.

for the hopdev admins: i added the necessary files as zip archive to the antville installation at hopdev. i also had to tweak the root and weblog type.properties. currently there is also a function missing that is called when starting up the application. does not seem to matter, it's superseded anyway.