Technical Bleg

As you know, Google+ is going away.  This blog is not one of the several I have written / will yet write kvetching about that.

What I am looking for is some tools that must already exist, but have not come to my attention yet.  I think maybe a reader can help.

I am using the Google+ Exporter from FriendsPlusMe, and I really like it. It grabs everything with reasonable efficiency. Given that its performance is limited to what Google will allow it to do, it's just fine.

So now I have a fistful of WordPress XML Import files and I'm still not happy. Because, a WordPress blog seems wrong for preserving the archive of my G+ activity. The site will be forever frozen after April 2, and really, a huge PHP application regenerating the same HTML over and over seems like a waste.

So what I want is a way to create static HTML from the XML or the JSON forms of my Google+ life. With some flexibility as to format, for which I will be happy to work.

But: most people I have asked about this so far respond, Oh that's easy, just start writing Python. That's not how I envisioned it, shall we say.

It seems inconceivable that there is no fairly general tool already written to transpose JSON data of a stream of social media postings to a static HTML page.

Yes. I know.

SO here's my request for the reading community: can you point me to any tools you know that generate readable HTML pages from JSON (or XML) data? Even if they are some really goodjqfilters, I think I would rather deal with that than "Step 1 Learn Python / Step 2 Write an awesome Python filter to do what you want..."

This article was updated on May 9, 2023

David F