Offline Blog Reader?

March 12, 2009 9:04 AM

Offline blog reader? I've backed up my blog into an XML file. I'd like to read it offline. Open Office has XML support but this is not an efficient solution. There are online solutions--importing the xml file into a new blog, for example--but I'd just like to read while offline from the xml file. Is there a program that will permit this?
posted by tesseract420 to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Have you tried opening it in a browser. From memory, Google Chrome opens and displays XML files quite nicely.
posted by Happy Dave at 9:05 AM on March 12, 2009

wget is your friend:

wget -r -l 1 -k -p -np websitename

This will download a local copy of a site (1 link deep) and localize all of the links.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 9:20 AM on March 12, 2009

wget won't work because I've taken the blog offline and I need to read from the xml file.
I'm on a Mac and I don't have Chrome handy, but I used Stainless and it opened the file without any problems, and except for the posts made with Windows Live Writer, the blog is easy to read. I'll try to get to a Windows machine and try Chrome, but your suggestion is a great one; thanks Happy Dave!
posted by tesseract420 at 9:51 AM on March 12, 2009

I was about to ask a very similar question. [I'd like to make my own, offline RSS feed, using images resident on my computer].

One solution seems to be to make a quick server and direct all the links to localhost. I can imagine perhaps as little find and replace will do the trick, but I'd rather have a solution that doesn't involve IIS or Apache, which are headache's in the long term if not the short.
posted by gensubuser at 11:32 AM on March 12, 2009

Firefox applies a default stylesheet when opening RSS from the web. But not, apparently, if you just open the saved file in Firefox. There is probably a way of working around that, if only by running a very lightweight http server on your desktop.
posted by Good Brain at 12:01 PM on March 12, 2009

Yes, using Feed Demon. Or am I missing some complexity to the question I wonder?
posted by DrtyBlvd at 12:19 PM on March 12, 2009