I spotted this reminder about leaving data in someone else’s little garden the other day, something which always makes me uneasy, and this note about google finding a new way to be evil (and the usual torrent of jokes about G+ being DOA), and decided it might be a good time to take another look at migration/retention/alternative options.
So I went looking to see if someone had an easy migration solution, hoping for something that can scrape the takeout file into tagged posts or the like. What I found is Google+ Importer, which is free and claims to be way, way better than that. It looks like it can actively scrape G+ activity into its own category, and automatically mark it with user-selectable text and/or CSS. Things might be a bit broken around here while I try to add it, but hopefully my newsreader sharing will automagically be mirrored here when I’m done.
Edit1: Google+ Importer didn’t do quite what I wanted, trying Daniel Treadwell’s Google+Blog WordPress Plugin to see if it is more to my liking. It only took me about 10 minutes of tampering to remember that I hate dealing with CSS (and even worse, PHP), and pine for the days of writing static HTML pages, with server-side includes if you were feeling fancy.
Edit2: Google+Blog WordPress Plugin is closer to what I wanted, but I’m going to disable it and remove the imported posts for now. There are still a few things I really don’t like about the behavior (I want to be able to set all G+ imports to use the “Aside” format, I want them excluded from RSS, etc.), and it is going to be more fiddling than it is worth to get things there. I’m still looking for a mechanism I like, I really want my own web-accessible copy of my G+ content, and/or to make my public ‘net activity easily visible in one place. There really should be some easy way to syndicate in one direction or the other.
Edit3: I tried adding a widget to just show show the top of my G+ feed, but none of the widgets that interact with G+ content directly seem to work right now, I guess they haven’t been updated after an API change or somesuch.
