Hi there,

I know its been awhile since you released this, but it is working wonderfully to move a large site (blogger refuses to do a download - gets a time out error).  I downloaded files of 100 posts & comments each.  And used a conversion utility to change to RSS and uploaded to WP.  Fine.  Except!  There's no comments in the atom / xml files when I open to look at them.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be able to view them or not?  Either way, they're not importing.  and I checked the log - it says it is checking for comments, then saving them, etc, but there aren't any to be found in the actual xml file.  Can you point me in the right direction please?  

Thank you!

The Blogger Backup utility stores the comments as separate XML files... So there should be a XML file for the blog post and then one named *.comments.xml.

So if there's a post named 20120105T024600-Greg.xml, any comments would be in 20120105T024600-Greg.comments.xml

Does that make sense? I know this makes restoring them a pain, but at the time it was the only way I could find to easily save the comments.

One question... when saving the posts, what option did you use? "Atom, one file per post" or "Atom, All posts in single file"?

The comment above applies to "Atom, one file per post". If you used the "All posts in a single file" in doing a test run, it looks like there might be a bug where the *.comment.xml files might be stored in another location, in the "current" folder (the folder the app thinks is the current folder). For example, during the test run I mentioned, the comment files were stored in the sample folder as the app/exe. 

If you're not seeing any *.comments.xml files, do a quick drive search and see if you can find time (yeah, I know... lame.. sorry about that).

That issue is fixed in a v1.5 (which is in private beta at this point, which I can add you too if you wish?). The comments are still separate, but at least they are with the bigger/main XML file.

gduncan411 wrote:

One question... when saving the posts, what option did you use? "Atom, one file per post" or "Atom, All posts in single file"?

The comment above applies to "Atom, one file per post". If you used the "All posts in a single file" in doing a test run, it looks like there might be a bug where the *.comment.xml files might be stored in another location, in the "current" folder (the folder the app thinks is the current folder). For example, during the test run I mentioned, the comment files were stored in the sample folder as the app/exe. 

If you're not seeing any *.comments.xml files, do a quick drive search and see if you can find time (yeah, I know... lame.. sorry about that).

That issue is fixed in a v1.5 (which is in private beta at this point, which I can add you too if you wish?). The comments are still separate, but at least they are with the bigger/main XML file.

I used "all posts in single file" up to 100 per file.  That created 15 files of posts.  I found the comments- thank you!  But there are only 570 comment files, which I dont understand?  If there are 1447 posts, and *nearly* all of them have comments, shouldn't there be approx 1,440 comment files?

can you shed some light? 

Also - if I can pick your brain for a sec - do you know of a program where I can 'sew' these files together? 

Yeah, there should be (keyword) one comment.xml file for every post with one or more comments, so if every post had one or more comment then there should be 1440'ish comment files.

Is your blog public with a public feed? Can you give me it's URL?

As for merging them, that would be tough. With code, I'm sure it could be done with code, but with a stand-alone utility, none come to mind.

Even Google's Blogger Export keeps the comments separate (it puts them at the end of the Export in their own <entry> entries). So they are not inline with their original comment, but separate entries that are "linked" to their original posts with the <thr:in-reply-to> elements.

To see this, create a simple test blog, put a few posts and comments on it and then use the Blogger export feature (which I've had timeout/issues with too BTW).

On a related note, doesn't WordPress have a Blogger import feature?

Cathy, I've emailed you, via the CodePlex Contact User feature, so we can move this discussion offline for a bit. You should have already gotten it, if not, please shoot me an email when you get a chance... gduncan411[at]hotmail[dot]com

Thanks

Also quickly, in looking at your client's site, looks like a number of the older posts don't have comments (at least in spot checking them) so there's no easy 1:1 count for the comments. In walking the code, it looks like we're grabbing the comments where that do exist. Am spot checking more now... :)