As part of migrating my main website and other sites to a new hosting service, I have also been working to create backups of sites hosted elsewhere. One of those sites was a weblog I created using Drummer (created by Dave Winer) and using the oldSchool blogging template/tool. As part of other updates made by Dave Winer, there was a problem with the template being used for the oldSchool blogs. One Drummer user (Frank McPherson) did make updates to his template and was able to restore full display of his site. After that incident, I decided it would be better for me to have a separate backup site from the Drummer-hosted sites.
Dave Winer created two repos related to publishing blogs using Drummer and oldSchool. One (oldSchoolBlog) was the code used to create the blogs. Another (drummerCms) was a shell to allow other outliners to use the oldSchoolBlog code.
I installed both of the repos locally and made some attempts to execute the code, but had some problems. I did some troubleshooting, and added a config.json file which helped somewhat. However, the design of the oldSchool logic was set up to publish files to Amazon S3, which was not my goal (I wanted a local copy that could be hosted wherever I wanted).
Eventually, I used Claude Code to create a runner for the drummerCms repo to take the weblog OPML file and create a website on the local filesystem. The updates that Frank McPherson had made to his site were helpful in reaching this goal.
I have created a Git repo (oldSchool-backup-tool) which includes build scripts to call drummerCms to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog, and instructions for running the scripts. I have uploaded my converted site to be part of my main website. If any former Drummer oldSchool bloggers have questions on use of the tool, feel free to add issues to the Github repo above or contact me directly (see my About page).