DroidMod

I thought I’d share how I restored the old posts, since someone somewhere might find it useful.

As it happens, Google Reader stores all of the old posts, so the content was not totally lost. The first step was to add the DroidMod feed to Google Reader. Next, I exported all of the posts to an Atom feed. This part is a bit tricky, because the feed is only available for starred items, so I had to un-star everything I had starred in Google Reader, and star all of the items from the DroidMod blog. Then I got an Atom feed of the posts from www.google.com/reader/atom/user/[userid]/state/com.google/starred?n=200. Replace [userid] with the _USER_ID javascript variable from the page source of Google Reader (on line 22, at the time of this post). Next, I converted the Atom feed to an RSS feed using, of all things, Yahoo Pipes. I got the idea from this pipe. One could use that pipe as is if the Atom file is somewhere reachable from a URL. I exported the pipe as RSS, sent the data in to the WordPress RSS importer, and bingo, data restored.

The drawback of the RSS importer is that it wont restore meta-data like post author, permalinks, tags, etc., so there will still be some housekeeping to do after the import, but it is certainly much less work than re-creating all of the posts by hand! Comments are also lost, but it might be possible to do something similar using the comment feed. This would certainly be much more complicated.