Blogger Hack – Using Blogger to generate RSS 2.0

At the outset this site was to be a learning experience as well as a medium to publish articles for Family and Friends about my expanding family. With this in mind I created a Blog using simple XML storage for the Blogs. I settled on using RSS 2.0 as a storage schema as it seemed a good standard. It allowed me to easily create a display UI, but the only problem was finding time to develop a UI for adding or editing articles. After a little research I discovered Google’s Blogger tool/service and began investigating. Eventually I found that I could hack blogger to produce RSS feed XML for the purposes of storing my articles, with out the need to rewrite the display UI.

The only reason I moved from Blogger was that I wanted more control over the data and felt that the best way to do that was through MySql. I have a strong programming background and a system that leveraged PHP and MySql held great appeal. As a result I migrated to using WordPress instead of Blogger. Although I do not use Blogger any longer I thought I would share the Hacks I was using.

Basically my hack is fairly simple in nature. Using the Template editing in Blogger I created a template that would output RSS 2.0 XML. I then set publishing for the blog to be FTP and pointed it to the correct location on my web server, and had the output go to a file with a xml extention.

Once I had the xml file stored on my server I could use the existing UI code I had developed to spit out the html pages.

You can download the Blogger to RSS 2.0 Template I used, and feel free to modify it as required. It could certainly be used as a basis for a template to create RSS 0.92 or RSS 1.0 documents.