Every once in a while I want to populate a new blog with articles from InfoGoRound. The usual method of cut and paste can be horribly tedious and time consuming, so I turned to some free software I created several years ago to convert InfoGoRound articles into neatly formatted HTML files.

InfoGoGetter allows you to name files with any extension, and use any template you want, so I created a template.xml file that looked like this:

<item>
<pubDate>Mon, 26 October 2009 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category>Wordpress</category>
<category>Blogging</category>
<title><!--TITLE--></title>
<content:encoded><p><!--ARTICLEBODY--></p></content:encoded>
</item>


Of course, you’d want to change the date and category names to ones that fit your blog, but that’s all there is to it.

Then, I went through and converted all the articles I thought were useful with this template and saved them with a .xml extension.

Once I was done, I used a search and replace tool to remove spaces between the paragraph tags, since the Wordpress import documentation said that linebreaks would convert as extra br tags, which would make way too much space between paragraphs.

Then, I opened a Command Prompt window, navigated to the directory where all the articles were stored, and typed:

type *.xml > file.rss


This command works like cat in linux/unix to concatenate all the xml files into one big file.

Then all that was left was to import the new file.rss into Wordpress.

The Import menu is under Tools in the Wordpress admin sidebar.

Simply choose the RSS import option, find the file on your hard drive, and voila, they’re all done!

Of course, the more articles you want to import, the more useful this is. Still, even with just 11 articles, it saves a fair chunk of time.

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