12/03/2017

[Python] BloggerBackup script to backup Blogger posts

This script allows users to quickly download posts from their Blogger blog in order to keep a backup copy. On Windows there is the amazing BloggerBackupUtility but sadly that's not available for Linux as well, hence this small project comes to life.

You can get the utility here or check out the source code here. To run it, you must have Python 3 installed.

Usage is:

 bloggerbackup --api-key <API key> --blog <blog URL> --backup-dir <backup directory> [--start-date <date>] [--end-date <date>] [--verbose]  

options:

   --help - prints this help  
   
   --api-key <api key> - mandatory API key used to issue queries  
   
   --blog <blog URL> - mandatory URL of the blog to operate on  
   
   --backup-dir <backup directory> - mandatory directory where to put the posts backup  
   
   --start-date <date> - optional, date from which to begin fetching posts in RFC 3339 format: yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss+HH:mm  
   
   --end-date <date> - optional, date where to stop fetching posts in RFC 3339 format: yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss+HH:mm  
   
   --verbose - optional, prints debug information while processing  

The script is extremely barebone and definitely improvable. Also, it requires you to setup an own API key in order to issue queries in the free tier. To do so, visit the Google credentials page.

Now for some impressions, Python was amazing for this task. It took longer to remember how to write the code and writing all the error checking and similar than to issue the queries and parse the responses. Also getting and linking extra libraries was a matter of seconds.

However, the indentation requirement is still hurting a lot, even when using PyCharm IDE it still does not make your life easy.

No comments:

Post a Comment

With great power comes great responsibility