Open Migration: Rescuing Content and Images from Squarespace
We’re currently helping our clients at Dubspot migrate their blog from Squarespace to a new system which will be built around a multi-user setup of WordPress.
Squarespace’s propaganda goes on about “Total Data Portability”, and how “your data is yours to keep”. However, when it comes to moving to another system, there’s no automated method to get your images and other files out. You can use a “data export” to create a Movable Type formatted export of your posts (which will import fine to most blogging engines), leaving your images in their proprietary file system, to which you only have web access, and no functionality to create an archive for downloading.
I asked Squarespace support if there was any other way to get our images out, and their response was “Currently there is no feature for this — each file will need to be downloaded individually from File Storage, sorry about this.”
I asked if we could get a Squarespace dev to compress the directory so we could download it, and got various permutations of “that feature doesn’t exist, but I can suggest it as a future feature” from 3 different Squarespace support people:
Fortunately, while all this frustration was going on, I figured out a sneaky little system to allow me to download all of the images directly from their web interface. It uses Firefox and the DownThemAll extension.
How to rescue your images from Squarespace
If you don’t already use Firefox, download and install it, and make sure you check the “Use Firefox As Your Default Browser” box. Welcome to Modern Browser Land. You’re going to like it here.
Next install DownThemAll, and restart Firefox.
Login to your Squarespace account, and go to the “File Storage” area. Hopefully, like Dubspot, you haven’t been too organized, and most of your images are in a single directory, like this:
Right click on the page, and select “DownThemAll”.
We only want the posted files, which are held under a directory called “storage”, so click the URL column header to sort all the files by URL. DownThemAll had skipped out some files – PDFs and SWF mostly.
Click “Start”, and you get all of your files back. Well done.
Unfortunately your journey isn’t over yet. Squarespace’s Movable Type formatted export includes a lot of cruft in the HTML, which takes a bit more work to fix up. Details to come.
Oxygen Kiosk at Unconvention Brisbane
Over the weekend, Oxygen Kiosk was involved in Unconvention Brisbane, a “not for profit grassroots led music conference for DIY and Independent promoters, labels, entrepreneurs, writers, technologists, innovators and artists.” I setup a webcast for both days of conference panels, played an audiovisual set as half of Cowper, spoke on the Music as Product panel [...]
We’re Hiring! Junior Web Ninja
We’re looking for a junior web developer/silent killer to work remotely or from our Sydney office. Official transmission follows: Oxygen Kiosk, the sleek web boutique in Sydney and Brisbane is looking for a junior web developer for a 6-month contract (with a view to executing a permanent position). We’re geekily obsessive about code and hype-free [...]
Ads For Your Blog: Simple Code for Calling OpenX’s Single Page Call Within WordPress Using current_post
Advertising is one of those “necessary evils” of the web, and of non-ecommerce blogs in particular. For blogs which aren’t associated with a particular product or revenue-generating business, advertising is the main way to pay the bills. It’s not something which generally enhances a site, but we try our hardest to ensure that it’s not [...]
You can read more of our blog posts.