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Blog Slurping Not Working

Recently, we are getting reports from bloggers, anxious to publish their blogs on paper, that Blurb and BookSmart are no longer able to retrieve blog content.
TypePad, WordPress.com, and Blogger are all bugged out on BookSmart. For some reason, these platforms made changes in their APIs, in essence how their code talks to our code, and BookSmart can’t recognize those changes.
and
These problems have been escalated to the dev teams at TypePad, WordPress.com, and Blogger.


It sounds like BookSmart is a typical third party product, with the vendor unwilling to make changes at their end, to support changes made by Blogger. Now they want Blogger (TypePad, WordPress) to support their code, so they can continue to extract data ("slurp"?) using their own code, unchanged.

If BookSmart, a third party product, uses Blogger APIs to retrieve content, and Blogger changes their APIs, Blurb then should update their code which uses the APIs. Almost surely, Blogger's support for Blurb is limited to the APIs which they provide.

For Blurb to use the Blogger APIs, develop a market based upon Blogger (TypePad, WordPress) customers, then neglect to update their code, seems a little short-sided.

Fortunately, alternative solutions are available.

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Comments

Autumn said…
Thanks for the info. I am SO sad about this. What can we do about this? Please!! I need to publish my little book.
Nitecruzr said…
Hi Autumn,

So far, I think that I've seen maybe 3 threads mentioning this issue. Not exactly a wildfire, here. I'm trying to interest Blogger Support, but I don't bet that's going to happen at this rate.

I really think that the changes have to come starting from BookSmart. If Blurb customers start bugging Blurb, rather than Blogger, you'll probably be better off.
R H Hunt said…
Blog2Print is also running a Holiday Special, with reduced prices on Blog Books...
Eli Burke said…
There is a piece of software that you can use to export a full Blogger blog, import it into LiveJournal, and then "slurp" into Blurb's BookSmart software. It seems to work flawlessly.
http://linuxlore.blogspot.com/2007/09/livejournal-to-blogger-or-blogger-to.html

Blurb's position on this is ridiculous. I think their software developers are lying to the marketing people about the difficulty of fixing whatever is broken.

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