Not having fun with Vox

I guess I’m writing this just as a warning to anyone else who’s thinking of signing up for a Vox.com blog account. I had a Vox blog for a couple of years and wrote about 200+ posts on it.

After getting my hands on the leonard.ie domain name, I decided that it would make an awful lot of sense, given my increasing familiarity with WordPress to switch over to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Once I had things set up I went about looking into getting my blog posts off the old Vox blog and importing them into my new self-hosted blog.

All of a sudden I realised that Vox offer no export option for your blog posts. I’ve done an awful lot of searching on this one and haven’t found any simple way to get the information out of Vox and into WordPress. I think I will get there eventually, but it’s certainly not easy.

The strange thing is that Vox don’t even offer an export for any of the SixApart blogging tools (Moveable Type or TypePad).

Exporting Vox

If you’re looking to export your Vox blog posts, I’ve narrowed the options down to (in the case of WordPress as the import tool):

  1. Copy and paste every post into a new post – definitely not going to happen
  2. Import from your Vox Full RSS feed – you’d have to save “http://yourname.vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml to your computer” then upload to the WordPress import function, and then (as the RSS feed only shows the most recent 10 posts) you’d have to delete the last 10 posts from Vox and do it all over again. Not really that appealing if you have a lot of blog posts.
  3. Use BlogBackupOnline – this service will “backup” all of the posts from your blog. It does work and it does allow you to export an RSS style feed from it which contains all your Vox posts (and comments). However I am having a bit of trouble importing it at the moment. It will import the titles and dates but none of the content – so I think I’m going to need to do some editing of the xml file to standardise it or something.

As you can see from the above, it’s all a bit of a pain in the hole. Bad Vox.

That is all.

Other Spectacular Shows!

Comments