Pull a single blog post from one of my blogs into another?

August 17, 2007 12:28 PM

Very occasionally, I'd like to be able to pull a **single** post from one of my blogs into another. In other words, not just link to it, but actually have the post in Blog A show up as a post in Blog B, without having to re-type it and duplicate content. Does anyone know a way to do this? I don't want to scrape the entire feed for all posts in Blog A into Blog B. Thanks!
posted by tamjl to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Just off the top of my head, it probably depends on the blog packages you use.
posted by rhizome at 12:32 PM on August 17, 2007

ctrl-c ctrl-v?
posted by doublesix at 12:33 PM on August 17, 2007 [2 favorites]

There is a way to do this but again you have to share your blogging platform. I think I've seen this done with wordpress based on tags.
posted by craniac at 12:35 PM on August 17, 2007

there's an MT plugin called multiblog which does this very nicely. i think it's now part of MT4. but it depends on your blogs being run from the same installation.
posted by ascullion at 2:35 PM on August 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

The cludgy way would be (forgive me if I state the obvious, you know what happens when one "assumes"):
1) Go to Other Blog
2) Open another tab or window, in which you log into Your Blog and start your post, being sure to select "edit html" in most modern blog publishing systems (WP, Blogger, etc).
3) Go back to the tab/window with Other Blog in it and view the source. In Firefox you will find this option under the "View" menu, your web client may vary.
4) Find the post you are trying to import. I recommend putting the title into the "find" feature of your browser.
5) Select the text of the post. Because you are viewing source, you will also be selecting the html commands for stuff like links, formatting, font, italics, paragraphs, etc..
6) Copy.
7) Go back to Your Blog and Paste into the "edit html" window.
8) Re-edit and change formatting as necessary to conform to the style of Your Blog.
9) Save and/or Publish.

A caveat: if this is not material you have written, and you plan to quote the entire thing (rather than quote 3 juicy paragraphs and offer a link to the whole thing), you should probably get permission from the author or content owner (and be sure your readers know who wrote it!!). If you fail to do so, be prepared for a nasty email or worse yet a lawyer letter telling you to attribute it properly or take it down.
posted by ilsa at 2:58 PM on August 17, 2007

Thanks so far, folks, but most of these are not what I'm looking for. I know how to copy and paste, for example

I'm looking for a plugin or widget or service that'll automate it for me by me designating a specific post from Blog A that I want to pull in and show in its entirety on Blog B. Almost like legit scraping, but not the entire blog.

I use WordPress.

I'll look into whether I can make Multiblog work.

Any other ideas out there? Thanks!
posted by tamjl at 3:25 PM on August 17, 2007

You could use something like MagPie RSS (which is a PHP script) and customize it to only pull in entries with certain keywords attached. I do this between my blog site, and my full website (yes, I run separate sites for... myself).

I also cross-post to an LJ account, which is easy enough, and I basically have an LJ account that I can't log into, but that automatically posts whatever I put on the blog site.

However, keeping up blogs on several other social networks alongside those 3 cross-posted sites I mentioned, requires copy/pasting much the way lisa described it.
posted by revmitcz at 5:35 PM on August 17, 2007

Just to clarify, ascullion's right -- Movable Type will let you bring in blog posts from any one or more blogs in your system onto a single page. This is built in to MT4, which is free, and you can choose which posts appear from which blogs. I work with the MT team, so feel free to drop me a line if you need help with this.
posted by anildash at 12:22 PM on August 20, 2007

I'm looking for a way to do this in Wordpress, too. Haven't found a simple way, but have heard mention of copying stuff out of the MySQL database for one blog and adding it to the database for the other.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 9:59 AM on September 25, 2007