Before having my own domain for my blog, I was a huge fan of Yahoo! 360. I love its simplicity and its integration with other Yahoo services. But my enthusiasm slowly faded since Yahoo decides to pull the plug on Y360. Then I found WordPress and I fell in love again. Now my major problem is how do I migrate all my Y360 entries into WP? The most obvious solution is to manually copy all my Y360 entries and paste it to WP one by one. If your post has comments and tags, you should do the same if you want it completely “save” the entry. But what if you have over 50 entries in Y360 with more than 20 comments each? What a nightmare.
I tried searching the web for a quick solution to this migration problem. Some suggested to import the rss feed of Y360 to WP. Unfortunately, Y360 feed only covers the last 10 posts of your blog and comments are not included in the feed as well. I hate to see all my Y360 posts go into waste so I decided on creating my own Y360 to WordPress tool a shot.
My plan is to leech the title, entry content, published date, tags and comments and their dates in the Y360 html page itself. Since I don’t have my own web hosting that supports ASP.Net [ donations are welcome ;-) ] I decided to make it a standalone Window App. As it turns out, the .Net framework doesn’t have a built-in HTML parser. I searched the web and came across HtmlAgilityPack. This is an open-source HTML Parser created in C# which promises to be an agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT.
Capabilities:
- Converts a Yahoo! 360 blog to a single xml file and can be imported in a WordPress powered blog.
- Aside from the entry title, entry date and entry content, this app can extract entry tags and comments (comment date, author, content)
- Preserves the old formatting the 360 content
- Maintains the images attached inside the blog entry.
- Auto conversion of 360 dates to WP dates
- Supports HTTP proxy server and domain name authentications
Limitations
- Main image of the 360 blog entry (located the top of the entry just below the title) will not be included.
- Can extract only the first 50 comments of an entry. Y360 paginates comments by groups of 50. Since the app only leeches the front page of an entry, comments located inside the next page are not included.
- Slow extraction especially for blog with more than 50 entries. I tested it on my own Y360 blog with 25 entries and 112 comments and the whole process was completed in 3 minutes and 52 seconds
As of this posting, I will only release the setup files. This will be sufficient for you to install the app in your machine. I am planning to also release the source code after I tidy up my codes a bit.
Go to my Y360 To WordPress page in codeplex to download the beta release. The installation note and how to use the app are also located there. Feel free to post a comment for your feedback and suggestions regarding the app.
Enjoy!
Hello Sir,
I too loved Y360 and now am comfortable with Wordpress. I have been cutting and pasting my entries from Yahoo to WP since October 97 since I can find no import tool until I found yours today. I have over 200 entries to go.
I downloaded it and tried to make the conversion but got the following error. Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong? I would appreciate your input.
“Unable to read data from the transport connection: Attempted to read write protected memory. This is often and indication that other memory is corrupt”
PS my y360 blog is set to public so that’s not the problem
Thank you for your time
I find your program very interesting so i tried it out, but somehow it doesnt support unicode. After the import the characters dont look like they have to be. Can you fix it, please?
Thank you
Excelent blog and comments. Thanks and best regards Private Krankenversicherung
I went to the link provided … but I got the following message.
Yahoo 360 To Wordpress Converter
This project is not yet published
If you are a coordinator or developer on this project, please sign in to access the project.
I just want to get an xml file of my blog to import it to blogger.
Thank you very much for your time.
Hi, I was able to convert my Y360 blog to .xml file using your converter. It was amazingly easy to use. One problem though … I wanted to upload that xml file to “Blogger” and not wordpress. Blogger had some issues to upload it. Is there reason why this might be so?
Thanks
When I try to use this program, it eventually gives the error “The operation has timed out”. If I click details, this is at the top of the error box:
************** Exception Text **************
System.Net.WebException: The operation has timed out
at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
at Y360ToWordpress.Form1.saveHTMLLocal(String url, String filename)
at Y360ToWordpress.Form1.button1_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
**************
I have a lot of blog entires (currently 198). Could that be why?
Thanks for providing this bit of software. When I tried using it on my blog, it ran for several minutes and then generated this error:
System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server —> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 68.142.227.189:80
A second run produced the same results. I’d appreciate any help you can give on this. Thanks!
I have tried this out weekly since I first dl the program in July but it just doesn’t work for me. Has anyone here been successful with this program? Perhaps you could help me out in determining what is going wrong for me.
Thank You
Yipee!!!!
I *finally* got it to work after many many tries over many many months.
My problem was simple. I was not giving the program enough time to do it’s thing. There is no indicator as to whether it is working or not and I thought it had stalled/crashed — but found out after checking to see what “Processes” were running that is was just very slow to work on my PC.
I can’t thank you enough for this miracle progream. I will spread the good word.
Now I just have to (1) delete the posts that I had added manually and (2) add all of my photos to Wordpress that I had on Y360 and I am good to go.
Any advice you can give on transferring the photos would be greatly appreciated.
I have a question that I hope you will take time out to answer:
Once all of the information is transferred - is it possible to add to the Y360 page and create another new xlm file and import it into Wordpress with it just picking up the new entries? Or will the previously transferred entries be duplicated?
Please advise at your earliest convenience.
Thanks in advance.