Freeware to convert a WordPress blog .XML export to Word

27 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Regex

Hurrah. Desktop software has been found that will robustly convert all of a WordPress blog .XML export to Word. Specifically, a free blog hosted at the .com WordPress, which doesn’t permit or offer any fancy ebook conversion plugins. The solution is good old Windows freeware, as usual. Though the various freeware directories know nothing of it, and it was only found after hours of digging.

The XML to Doc software is the snappily titled wpxslgui…

wpxslgui is a Windows application which converts an XML File generated by the WordPress Export function into an HTML or Word HTML document.

It’s Windows freeware in v.1.04 (June 2020) from Devio IT Services, being the worthy and generous Herbert Oppolzer of Austria. Tested and working here. Very simple usage, with a Windows GUI.

Also includes the option to… “Convert WordPress XML to a single HTML file allowing filter by category (JavaScript)” but the “Word HTML” output saves as a .DOC file.

However if you cleverly just re-name the .DOC to .HTML it then works fine as a Web page in a Web browser, and thus calls in the images. I’m assuming here that your browser is allowed to go online, but Word is not.

The overall aim here is to get the blog to a clean ebook format for Kindle, removing as much gunky code and blog-cruft as possible. Archivists may also be interested here. As such there are some initial changes you may want to make…

1). First you may want to delete the superfluous 24-hour timestamp by editing the WordPress .XML output itself. What you’re targeting looks like this…

Since datestamps have a unique pattern, a regex can deal with them. Simply deleting all timestamps in Notepad++ with a regex is…

\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}

…and note the single space at the start of the regex.

Running this removes all timestamps but leaves the date intact. Possibly a regex could also re-work the main date to something nicer (e.g. 12th July 2015), but it would likely be a very complex regex.

2). After conversion. wpxslgui adds italics on post titles. The CSS stylesheet is embedded at the top of the output HTML, and so changing this is just a matter of tweaking font-style:italic on H2. Bold might be better.

3). While you’re in the CSS you may want to have external links be something other than blue and purple. In which case edit the colours of a:link and a:visited in the header CSS.

4). wpxslgui adds numbering of posts, in front of each post title. The code spans multiple lines and looks like this…

Awkward, but not impossible for a regex to fix. This Search-Replace regex for Notepad++ will replace all of these with a tilde or whatever other elegant typographer’s HTML mark you might want.

5). Once you have output in semi-cleaned HTML, Ctrl + a should “Select all…” from the browser and then you paste to whatever you’re using. If you were keen on YouTube embeds you will then need to manually go through and delete the WordPress code for these. The WordPress YouTube ‘slug’ insert is presented raw in the post. Without a WordPress installation the code can’t call the video. The same will likely be true for any other fancy embeds of maps, charts, podcasts etc.

Finally, note also that wpxslgui only deals with posts, not pages.

Back to Google Search

12 Saturday Mar 2022

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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I’ve given up on DuckDuckGo as primary search-engine, now that it’s just Bing in sheep’s clothing. They were an indeterminate blend of Bing and Yandex, but now they’re reported to have thrown out the Russian Yandex. So they’re now just another Bing clone, including trackers. You can see it in the results. And who wants to use Bing for search? Ugh. Admittedly Bing has its good bits, these being Bing Images and Bing News. But the main search is not one of them.

Google Search thus now seems the best and only option, although you’re going to have to put up with and be able to ‘visually parse’ a lot more spam. I’m assuming you have the spam-iness locked down a bit, by using add-ons like Google Hit Hider. And that you see and can read the full URL path under each result (making it easier to detect pages pretending to be another site) rather than a ‘breadcrumbs’ URL.

So, Google Search it is, for now. Time for some light surgery on the Google Search interface, then.

1. I’m pleased to see that the UserScript Reorder Google Categories still works on Google. This allows you to re-order the items Images | News | Books | Maps | and have the ones you want up front. Then cruft like Shopping | Flights can be removed with the uBlock Element Picker.

2. The UserScript Alternative Search Engines 2 will then let you layer a set of links into Google, such that the current Google Search keyword “or phrase” can be passed over to other engines with one click. Works fine, and I’m pleased to see that JURN can be one of these links. Result…

To get this just edit the Alternative Search Engines 2 script code thus…

This hack now replaces the defunct UserScript I made a few years ago, to add such a JURN link to Google Search.

If you don’t care for Bing Images (see above code), Brave Images is basically Bing Images with a nicer and less fussy UI.

The alternate services are searched in a new window, so your current Google search session is not voided.

You can’t pass the current search keyword over to Google Books or Google News or Maps this way, because the script can only add it the end of each URL. If you could add it in the middle, then the user could do away with Google’s own bar of sub-links entirely. But Books and News have URLs that look like this…

As you can see, the keyword needs to be inserted in the middle. It’s probably possible, and maybe I’ll further hack the code to do that if I find time. Anyway, it all works well so far, with the dual link-bars that are both capable of capturing the current Google Search terms and passing them through.