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BlogML

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Have you ever had a blog and wanted to move to another one?  Maybe you had an early version of .Text and wanted to move to an upgrade or to CommunityServer when it came out.  Maybe you had SingleUserBlog and wanted to move to DasBlog.  Did you end up doing it or was it just too difficult?  Read on to hear me explain about how this will be a no-brainer in the future...

BlogML - defining a standard for Blogs

A while back I wrote about my desire for there to be a common way to describe a Weblog and today I want to introduce what this will look like.  But first, here's a reminder of the vision...

BlogML - the requirements

As a blog user, I should have complete control over my content to the point that I can easily meet these 3 key requirements:

Abililty to port blog content between Blog Engines
This is the case where you might have a blog based on .Text version 0.95 and you want to upgrade to CommunityServer.  Having an "Export to BlogML" in .Text and an "Import from BlogML" function in CommunityServer would totally solve this problem.

Abililty to port blog content between Blog Engine Versions
Same as above.

Abililty to port blog content between Storage Providers
This is the case where you might be using a blogging engine such as SingleUserBlog and you are running off of one provider - such as DotTextProvider (where the content reads and writes to an existing .Text schema) and you want to continue to use SingleUserBlog but move to a new data structure.  In this case you would configure SingleUserBlog to use the DotTextProvider and run an "Export to BlogML" function, then you would re-configure your provider to your native provider and run the "Import from BlogML" function.

Abililty to easily back-up a blog
Here you would run some sort of scheduled job to automatically run the "Export to BlogML" function and save the output as a compressed backup file somewhere.

What is BlogML

I'm proposing that we define an Xml schema to fully define the structure and content of a blog.  To support this schema a blog would typically contain the abovementioned "Export to BlogML" and "Import from BlogML" functions which would emit the BlogML for that blog.  

The idea is that the schema would define a hierarchy of types that would allow you to fully describe the following types within a blog:

• Blog
• Categories
• Entries
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Attachments
• Content

At the bottom of this post is an example of what the output might look like for a Blog that had just a single entry.

In the next little while I will have the import/export features built into SingleUserBlog and will hopefully have concrete implementations (via HttpHandlers) for some other leading blogs too.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<blog>
  <entries>
    <entry id="e1" title="My first post" date="2001-11-19T00:00:00.00000">
      <content base64="false">
        This is a blog post
      </content>
      <categories>    
        <category ref="cat2" />
        <category ref="cat1" />
      </categories>
      <comments>
        <comment
          name="Darren Neimke"
          email="my@email.com"
          url="http://my.blog.com"
          date="2005-08-01T00:00:00.00000"
          >
            This is the comment.
        </comment>
      </comments>
      <trackbacks>
        <trackback
          url="http://my.blog.com"
          title="This is a trackback"
        />
      </trackbacks>
    </entry> 
  </entries>
  <categories>
    <category id="cat1" name="Category A" />
    <category id="cat2" name="Category B" parentref="cat1"/>
  </categories>
</blog>