Folks, rather stupid question: At the moment I use my external blog for hosting posts and import stuff via RSS into micro.blog. This works reasonably well but by now I noticed what’s actually obvious on closer look: In my blogging, images are embedded into posts using arbitrary tags. These apparently also appear in the RSS feed and the micro.blog import, just logically, only imports content not the images themselves. This is okayish functionwise but essentially now causes an interesting problem with me eventually wanting to sunset the old blog at some point. So, two questions:
Is there a way to make the RSS importer aware of images and fetch / store them locally on micro.blog?
Any recommendations on how to do this in a batch locally for posts that are already on micro.blog?
If you’re planning on sunsetting the old blog, I think that doing export/import from that blog in a supported format will almost certainly result in the best experience (and will cause Micro.blog to either fetch or store the images).
Why are you using arbitrary tags and not image tags in your RSS? That would break with almost all RSS readers, I’d think…
I would like to improve the RSS importer to copy images, but @jsonbecker’s right that a full “real” import will be the best for now. In the past I also considered having some kind of “copy all the images to my blog for existing posts” button. That is something we could explore again if there’s interest.
Gentlemen,
thanks for your feedback on that. Guess I got my wording wrong here - what I indeed meant: I do import HTML posts with tags embedded. Generally, I might be able to write a script that parses a few hundreds of posts, extracts / replaces the tags and copies the images files over to micro.blog or some other storage, but I am unsure how to do something like that in micro.blog at all. Do I have a chance of performing this kind of scripted batch processes?
As for sunsetting the external blog and full import: That’s not a real option. For one, I’ve been importing most of the posts to micro.blog via RSS so they’re here already, partially redistributed to Tumblr, Bluesky, … so there seems little point in re-importing them. Plus: I moved from Wordpress to Bludit a few months before diving into micro.blog, and while this one’s pretty neat, it doesn’t feature an export of any kind so this would be another option I’d have to manually implement. Not yet planning on sunsetting my blog completely as there are one or two things I’m still missing in micro.blog but definitely aiming at that on a mid-term timeframe, as for my purposes an m.b Premium would make much more sense and also be more economically feasible than web-hosting that blog on my own…
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I had in mind, but I forgot about the Micropub API, this was the missing piece here. Definitely will not do this anytime soon but it’s a relief to have this option, maybe a reason to dig into the API a bit after all. Thanks.
