The first step in my migration to Jekyll was to import my old posts into the Jekyll site. To do this, I used blogger2jekyll, a wonderful open-source Node.js script that does exactly that.

Using this tool is very simple. First, log into Blogger’s admin panel, got to Settings, Other, and click Export blog to download a giant XML file with all of your posts.

Next, install and run the script: (you’ll need to install Node.js first)

npm install -g blogger2jekyll
blogger2jekyll  /path/to/blog-dd-mm-yyyy.xml ./_posts

If you aren’t running it from the directory containing your Jekyll site, you’ll need to specify the full path to Jekyll’s _posts directory.

This script will create HTML files with the contents of each post from the exported blog, ready for Jekyll to serve. It will include layout: "post" in the Jekyll front matter; if you have a different layout name, you’ll need to do a bulk replace within the resulting files. It will also set the permalink for each post so that existing posts keep their old URLs (even if the Jekyll blog hasa different URL scheme).

I had a couple of problems with this script:

• When running on Windows, the generated permalink URLs use backslashes rather than forward slashes

• Posts that contain Liquid-like markup will break Jekyll with a parse error

• The script also imports comments directly into the resulting HTML, which is rarely a good idea.

I fixed all of these issues in a pull request, which has been merged and pushed to npm.

I changed it to wrap the contents of each post in a Liquid {% raw %} tag. I also added an internal option to skip comments. However, I didn’t add a command-line interface for the comment option; to use it, you’ll need to manually add , skipComments: true to the parse() call.

Next time: Converting Code Blocks