Update

Black Blade has released the Blog Importer tool, the one I used to export my blog. Download the tool today.

I’ve exported the posts in this blog to my company’s SharePoint blog site: Black Blade Associates Blogs.

Why?

I had a few reasons for exporting the posts. First, I wanted to generate more direct traffic to my company’s site from the search engines. The best way to do that is to have content on the site for which people are searching. Since many of my posts are related to SharePoint or other Microsoft products and technologies, the people reading the posts are exactly the people I want to see the Black Blade’s site.

How?

Ok, when I started the process, I thought it would be a no-brainer. I thought there must be a tool out there to import a public blog into a SharePoint blog site. If there is, I could not find one. So I wrote my own. I have to say, that it came out pretty good. The tool is a wizard-driven Windows Forms application that accepts a Blogger export file and a SharePoint blog site Url as inputs. You can tell the tool which posts to import, how blog authors will map to SharePoint users, and whether to rewrite the links that point to posts to use the SharePoint Url rather than the public blog Url.
One odd item I ran into was that while the tool worked great when importing to a default SharePoint blog site, the posts did not appear if the blog site had the Community Kit for SharePoint Enhanced Blog Edition (CKS EBE) applied. There were no import errors, but the posts just did not show up. Since we use CKS EBE on the Black Blade blogs site, this was obviously an issue I had to fix. After a bit of tinkering, everything worked well.
“Hw do I get this tool,” you ask? We will be releasing the tool and source code for FREE to the SharePoint community soon.

What’s Next?

Now that my posts have been imported to my company’s blog, I will post new articles to both sites. How? I plan to use Windows Live Write with the xPollinate (as in Cross Pollinate or cross post) plug-in. I’ve been a fan of Windows Live Writer for a while. I’m even more pleased that I can continue to use the tool now that I have multiple blogs to which I need to post. Here’s a great article that describes using xPollinate and Windows Live Writer to post to multiple blogs. One nice thing about xPollinate is that it lets you decide on a post by post basis to which blogs it should be published.
Check back soon for news on the SharePoint Blog Import tool. Happy blogging.