I’ve added a script, export_google_site_news , to my catchall repository on github.
For example, to download the news stories at https://sites.google.com/a/medinacommunityband.org/www/announcements, you would run
export_google_site_news \
https://sites.google.com/a/medinacommunityband.org/www \
announcements
The backstory
When Free It Athens moved our website from Google Sites to Drupal, we started from scratch rather than importing our old content. I realized on Wednesday that the news posts on the site were interesting historical information, yet I’d never archived them.
First, I tried a recursive wget.
wget -r --no-parent --no-clobber \
""
This failed to work because Google pointlessly used javascript rather than anchor tags to link between the news listing pages.
Next I found and tried to use the google-sites-export tool from Google’s Data Liberation Team, but I was never able to authenticate succesfully from it.
At this point I was worried I’d need to use a tool like Selenium to run the javascript, but then I realized the news listing pages took a single paramater to determine how far along in the pagination they were. It wouldn’t take more than a C-style for loop to download them all.
for i in $(seq 0 10 120); do
wget "" \
"-Onews.$i"
done
After doing that, I looked at the first one and determined a pattern that would match the relative URLs of individual news stories. I then extracted all the URLs.
grep -E -h -o '/a/freeitathens.org/foo/news/[a-z0-9\-]+' news.* |
sort -u > news_links
Once I had the list of URLs, it was simple to have wget download them all.
wget -i news_links -B https://sites.google.com
Since I didn’t find any other guides to doing this, I decided to flesh out what I’d done into a simple tool and write about it here.