Faced problems when creating blogbook using an Open Source BlogToBook program available on Github

BlogToBook, https://github.com/oormicreations/BlogToBook , seemed to be a promising software when I first came across it. My first attempt to install the software had failed some months ago, if I recall correctly. But when I installed it again today, it went through! I think the difference is that I now have Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition set up on my system and so it would have installed some libraries needed by the program executable.

I also tried cloning the Github repo using Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition. Visual Studio said I need to install some more software and prompted me for it. I started that install but for some issue from my side (I was fiddling with the Internet link), the install tripped up. Perhaps if I try installing it again it will work (Visual Studio gives a link for the components to install). But is it worth it? While I may quickly browse through the C++ source code, I don't think I want to understand its working and attempt modifications. So I don't know if I will retry cloning the Github repo.

But I had the software installed via its setup.exe and so could run it. However when I tried to create a blogbook of my TNS blog, the resultant epub reported errors for quite a few posts and had very limited or no content of those posts in the epub. Also I could not see any images in the epub. That makes it a disappointing matter.

One interesting thing is its user interface of a grid listing the posts. I liked that. However, that worked only for the TNS blog. The program seemed to run into some problems with my worldly blog (large XML backup file) and did not populate the grid with any items!

The github page links to an introduction and tutorial video: Blog To Book : Introduction and Tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccTxMO7SMCo , 24 mins. 55 secs., published on May 20, 2018 by Oormi Creations. At first, I saw the initial 4 mins. or so of the video and found it to be impressive. Clearly the software was working for some blogger blogs going by that video. That prompted me to try installing the software, which got installed this time around, but I could not get it to work for my blogs. 

After composing most of the above text, later I saw up to 6 mins. of the video. Around the 6 min. point, the narrator says that the software removes most of the formatting and all of the images and links!!! That makes it seriously problematic for me and I think I will not spend more time on this. I decided to put up this blog post as a record of this trial which I may find useful in future sometime if I forget something about this trial. And perhaps it may be of some use to some other reader(s).