Import Content Into Posterous Using PHP + cURL + RSS ...
Before I moved to Posterous from Symphony, I had to take a serious thought as to how I was going to transfer my old content into my new account. I didn't want to manually transfer my articles over and Posterous doesn't offer any kind of import feature for my system. Besides, either way, I was going to lose all of my visitor's comments. I actually considered trashing all my old content and start fresh just so I wouldn't have to deal with the issue.
So, obviously, I decided to go ahead and find an easy way to move my stuff to a new home. By using a combination of PHP, cURL and RSS I was able to easily accomplish this within minutes. Since I'm such a nice guy, I'll go ahead and show you how I did it.
After digging around this service, I found that Posterous provides a very simple REST-based API which, among other things, allows you to post new content to one of your sites.
I then realized I could use my current site's RSS feed as the source of my content. I went ahead and changed the settings to this feed to display every article I ever wrote on the site.
Next, I cracked my knuckles and got to work writing the following script:
<?php set_time_limit(0);define('IMPORT_RSS', 'http://www.mysite.com/'); // A direct link to the RSS feed you wish to import posts from ...
define('IMPORT_SITE_ID', 69); // The id of one of your Posterous sites ...
define('IMPORT_SITE_EMAIL', 'my@email.com'); // The email address assigned to your Posterous account ...
define('IMPORT_SITE_PASSWORD', 'password'); // The password assigned to your Posterous account ...$RSS = new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents(IMPORT_RSS));foreach($RSS->channel->item as $Entry)
{
$values = array
(
'site_id' => IMPORT_SITE_ID,
'title' => $Entry->title,
'body' => $Entry->description,
'date' => $Entry->pubDate,
); $curl = curl_init('posterous.com/api/newpost'); curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, IMPORT_SITE_EMAIL . ':' . IMPORT_SITE_PASSWORD);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $values);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);curl_exec($curl); curl_close($curl);
}
Before you run this script, be sure you have PHP5 compiled with cURL support. Simply change the above constants to their appropriate values, make sure your RSS feed is valid, upload the script and execute it in your browser. If your values are correct, you will start noticing your articles appearing in the proper order in your Posterous account.
Sweet!
Clearly, there are fancier ways to do this, but there's no need to create overly elaborate code I'm only going to be running once.
NOTE:
One thing you should realize when using the API, the REST end points should NOT include any part of the 'http://www.' prefix. Doing so will cause authentication errors even if you're using the correct credentials. This stalled me for a good hour or so and with the limited documentation, I was left to resolve the issue with no help. Hopefully, if you're having the same problem, this will help you out. If not, contact the Posterous support peeps.
Till next time!
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