I’ve been running my blog for the last 3 years. It started as my personal “thing’s I shouldn’t forget to read” list: with tons of information coming from all kind of sources, these days it’s easy to get lost and miss some stuff that really matters. I decided to keep a list of links and notes that would be cool to review when I have time. That’s how the blog was born. Initially it was targeted for only one reader – me. But at some point I realized that it might be interesting for my friends as well. And that’s how it became public.

Soon after that, the first question came up. As we know there are hundreds (ok, maybe dozens) of web sites that can help you to become a blogger. Each one has many features, BUT there is one thing I check first: what are my options in notifying “the readers” about new stuff on the blog? Seriously, it is a big deal for me. I tried many approaches.

1) You can just assume that people come to your site once in a while. The problem here is that I’m lazy. I can add 10 awesome (as all my posts are!) entries in one day when I’m in a mood and have time. Or I can totally abandon the site for months when I’m busy (read: lazy). The second is usually the case.

And people need to get some “fresh content” all the time. If they come to your site and there’s nothing new for a week, they assume it’s all over and will never come back.

2) Send an email/message when there’s something new. That can easily become annoying. “Oh, new entry on your blog? Guess what – I don’t care. And stop sending me that spam!”

3) Maintain an RSS feed. Probably the best option out of these three. Only people that really care about your stuff will add your feed to their RSS reader. Of course if they use one.

I’m getting very close to the actual reason why I’m telling all this. It’s GLEAMS. Yes, gleams. If you happened to use Windows Live Messenger or MSN Messenger, you probably saw those little stars that shine next to some of your contacts from time to time. Usually it says something like: “Foo’s space was updated. Foo is happy to say…blah blah yada yada…[a couple of the first lines from the latest blog entry]”.

If you click on it, you'll see something like this:

And based on what I see it is super catchy. Psychologically it works very well: those flashing stars really take your attention. And that’s all “the publisher” needs. By the way, “the publisher” does not have to do anything to send those gleams. It’s all automated. Submitting a new entry will automatically generate a gleam for your contact in your friends’ messengers. So I loved this feature and that’s how the second question came up: how do I transfer my original awesome precious content to Space? I really like how it sounds…

Apparently, my old blogging site (Blogger) and the new one (MSN Spaces) expose some APIs that can be used to play with your content (Metaweblog API for Space and Atom API for Blogger). I spent some time over the weekend and wrote a tool that helped me to transfer my data between two sites.

In case if somebody else is excited about gleams as much as I am ;] I've decided to share a copy of BCTransfer (Blog Content Transfer).

 DOWNLOAD HERE

Please let me know if it works and especially if it does not work for your. I’ll be more than glad to help.

Please read this first. It tells your how to get a login for your space.

At this moment, it is a command-line tool written using .NET 2.0. So you need to have it installed (the easiest option for that is Windows Update). Here’s how you run it in the most basic scenario:

bctransfer -bu <old-username> -bp <old-password> -su <new-username> -sp <new-password>

By default, the tool will give you a chance to review the results and then delete all transferred posts. I really don't want to break anything if you are already using MSN Spaces. This behaviour can be changed by adding the -k (keep) option.

For more advanced scenarios, just type bctransfer and play with different options.

Oh yeah, this MSN Space can be used as an illustration. It is full of my original awesome precious content transferred by the tool. In case if you care: it's a mix of Ukrainian/Russian/English languages. If you understand all of them there's another catch: so far I've only transferred posts from 2003/2004. No need to waste your time reading old news... ;] More GLEAMS will follow.