Blogger – Export Blog Entries to Individual Text Files

blogger

I have a friend with a Blogger blog (this one: PuzzleMad.co.uk), he wants to create a local archive of the individual entries. Now, exporting produces a large XML file which is fine as far as it goes, but the goal is to create an individual text-file (.txt for preference) and ideally with a Markdown representation of the content's formatting/structure for each blog-entry (the inclusion of comments is entirely optional and, depends only on the ease of including or removing them).

I suspect that this might involve applying a scripting solution to the exported XML file rather than a feature included within the Blogger engine itself, which is absolutely fine but might potentially be better suited to Stack Overflow.

I've looked at a few possibilities, from a search here, including:

  • How do I export my blog from Blogger? – which is more about freeing up photo-space from the linked Picasa service, and has only one answer which mentions that and then suggests the export-as-XML (which is either not a solution to this problem, or is not a complete solution to this problem).
  • Export blog entries from Blogger – doesn't seem to address the problem to which I'm looking for a solution.

Potential solutions:

  • Zoundry Raven – could possibly work, but it seems to be advertised/promoted as a means of managing multiple blogs rather than as a means to download/archive entries from blogs.
  • SiteSucker – retrieves and archives, but stops at that point, doesn't convert to a text file, certainly doesn't create a Markdown-esque representation of the text, or its HTML structure.
  • Backupify – I'm not quite sure what it does, but doesn't seem to, from what I've read, offer a specific means by which exporting-to-text is supported.

As noted, I suspect the end-result will be some form of parsing of the XML, using a scripting language, but if it's at all possible he'd prefer to avoid that, but is willing if necessary.

Best Answer

There is no capability to do what you want within Blogger. Both their standard export, as well as the Google Takeout export produce XML.

The only other option I can think of is some kind of screen-scraper. But TBH, scripting over the XML would probably be easier to do.