Howto recover WordPress posts from Google Reader

What if:

• You lost all your WordPress posts
• You are lucky for the fact that you have subscribed your blog on your own Google Reader
• There is no backup of DB or any tools that could help you to recover the lost files

Then you are lucky! Because you could recover:

+ Posts content that is fed to Google Reader

however you could not recover:

• Attachment post
• Comments
• Other miscs linked to the post

Here is how:

+ Login into your Google Reader, unstar all posts and star all items belongs to your blog
+ Next, we will export all those starred items to Atom XML file. But first, you need to grab your Google Reader ID. To do that, login to url http://www.google.com/reader/view/ then View Source of the page under Firefox or any browsers. Then you will need to search for _USER_ID in the source. For my case, the search result is:

_USER_ID = "10716493500706428020",

All good, next we need to generate the URL to ATOM XML, that is:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/USER_ID/state/com.google/starred?n=NUM_POST

replace USER_ID with your USER_ID and NUM_POST is the number of posts you want to retrieve. For my case, it is:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/10716493500706428020/state/com.google/starred?n=800

All good. Next I use XML parser and manipulate the Feed into RSS Feed then have it imported with WordPress’s builtin Import RSS function. I use Ruby for this tutorial, please feel free to adapt the code to your favorite language:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'simple-rss'
require 'open-uri'
require 'builder'
require 'progressbar'

source = "http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/10716493500706428020/state/com.google/starred?n=800" # url the google reader feed
content = ""

pbar = nil

feed = SimpleRSS.parse(open(source,
      :content_length_proc => lambda {|t|
        if t && 0 < t
          pbar = ProgressBar.new("Fetching Atom Feed", t)
          pbar.file_transfer_mode
        end
      },
      :progress_proc => lambda {|s|
        pbar.set s if pbar
      }))

xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new( :target => File.open("rss.xml", "w"), :indent => 2 )
xml.instruct!
xml.rss("version" => "0.9.2") do
  xml.channel do
    xml.title feed.channel.title
    xml.link  feed.channel.link
    xml.description "I am going to turn to RSS :)"
    xml.lastBuildDate feed.channel.updated
    xml.docs "http://backend.userland.com/rss092"
    xml.language "en"

    feed.items.each do | item |
      xml.item do
          xml.pubDate item.published
          xml.category item.category
          xml.title item.title
          c = item.content
          c.gsub!("\n",'')
          xml.description c
          xml.link item.link
      end
    end
  end
end

What you would have after running the script is rss.xml. But it’s not the perfect RSS feed. Here is what you need to clean up the file:

+ Remove the tag at the first line – I don’t know why XML instruct! create that line when use with File pipe – I will update the post if I find a fix
+ Search and replace

<
>

with

>
<

+ If you have images that link to attachment, you should search and replace it with the image path itself. I use TextMate to do this tedious task, use Search with Regular Expression.

Next, the last step is to login into your WP backend and go to Tools >> Import and select the rss.xml file. All done 🙂

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