Read Me

/**
 * Copyright 2010 Jeff Vannest
 * 
 * This file is part of MySpace Blog Exporter.
 * 
 * MySpace Blog Exporter is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * MySpace Blog Exporter is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 * 
 */

Introduction
===================================
The MySpace Blog Exporter extracts all entries from a MySpace blog and writes the entries to a WordPress or Blogger Format.

Program History
===================================
I wrote this tool because I wanted to move about 2-years worth of blogs from MySpace to WordPress. Imagine my surprise to find that my blogs were (from a technical point of view) being held hostage by MySpace. After some searching around the Internet I came across a tool that would use a MySpace blog RSS feed to extract blogs but there were some severe limitations, primarily that the MySpace RSS feed only provides the last 10 entries, a long way from the nearly 200 entries I had accumulated. To solve these issues, I wrote the MySpace Blog Exporter for my own personal use. Now, I share it with you.

Installation
===================================
1) Download the MySpace Blog Exporter zip distribution and extract it to a location on your hard drive. If you're using Windows, something like "c:\Program Files\MySpaceBlogExporter" should do nicely.
2) Verify that you have Java 6 as your default JVM. To do this, execute the following at a command prompt (without the quotes): "java -version". If your system reports something other than "java version 1.6.x_xx" (where x is any number), then stop! Read the Troubleshooting system before continuing.

Execution on Windows
===================================
1) Double-click the export.bat file.
2) Follow the on-screen instructions.

Execution on Any OS
===================================
These steps are for any operating system that has Java 6 installed.
1) Use a zip-compatible program do decompress MySpaceBlogExporter.zip to a folder.
2) Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder where MySpaceBlogExporter was decompressed.
3) Execute the command: javaw -jar MySpaceBlogExporterGui.jar
4) Follow the on-screen instructions.

Troubleshooting
===================================
Problem: I do not have Java 6 installed.
Solution: Install it and refer back to the Installation section to verify.

Problem: I receive the error message, "Error: Cannot find the 'rss' link on the blog page."
Solution: Verify the URL you entered is correct. Currently, blogs have an address similar to http://blogs.myspace.com/username. Test the program again and verify you have spelled the URL correctly.

Problem: I receive the error message, "Only pubic blogs are supported. Update the blog to be public and try again."
Solution: Log into MySpace and make your blog public.

Release History
===================================
14-Jan-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 1.0 - Initial release
16-Jun-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 1.0 - Updated to fix errors finding the end of a blog entry; updated to resolve links encoded to use the msplinks.com redirect.
15-Jul-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 2.0 - Added graphical user interface and converted to Java 6
30-Jul-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 2.1 - Added support for Blogger as an output format
15-Aug-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 2.1 - Tweaked bodyPattern property to better match blogs that use embedded <div> tags
16-Aug-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 2.1 - Fixed infinite loop when an msplink.com could not be resolved
17-Aug-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 2.1 - Fixed bug with high ASCII characters appearing as ? by encoding output files to UTF-8
13-Sep-2010: Jeff Vannest: Version 2.1 - Added message when blog is private