The breaking news for me this morning is Microsoft officially announced they will give up Live Space service and allow all users migrating to WordPress.com. This is so good, for human beings.

And my small tool Live Space Mover will probably accomplish his mission after serving for 3 years. I wrote this script when I worked as an intern in Bosch RTC in 2007, for moving my own blog posts to WordPress. Since then I maintained it at times, when receiving emails from users around the world. Most updates were catching up with Live Space upgrade, while some are just bug fixing. Several nice people sent me donations, which were the best times I’ve ever had. The largest donation(20$) came from a man using an “@microsoft.com” email ;)

The small script experienced a few significant changes in its not long life. The first change is from directly publishing posts to destination blog via MetaWeblog API to exporting XML for user to import by himself. This leveraged existing functions and made it much easier. The second change is about fetching blog comments more than 1 page. Live Space switched the way of paging comments between Ajax and non-Ajax several times. In the early versions of Live Space Mover I once successfully “decoded” some Ajax functions of Live Space by watching the Ajax http traffic and guessing parameter meanings. That was fun but quite time-consuming, and also made the early Live Space Mover “full functional”. Then Live Space switched to non-Ajax way and my life was much easier for a long time. Recently Live Space used an Ajax way again but I had lost interests to waste time on this sh*t… So current Live Space Mover can’t fetch comments more than 1 page.

By the news there are 30 million live space users. I guess maybe 10% of them will move to WordPress.com? That is still a large number. For Chinese bloggers who want to use a blog service which is not GFWed, self-hosted blog (WordPress or other blog app) would be the best but expensive choice, and blog.163.com is the best choice among free solutions AFAIK.