Tuesday, May 17, 2011

More Blogger trouble

I've been having more issues with Blogger over the last day or two (hence the delay). Anyone else having trouble? Most worryingly, when trying to make edits, I received the message "This blog has been deleted", which did give me some mild palpitations for a few seconds. Fortunately, I discovered the automated backup function (Dashboard --> Settings --> Basic --> Export Blog) just a few days ago. I had been backing up manually every now and then by saving pages a month at a time. Now, all I need is to discover that someone has written a script to automate the conversion/preservation of internal links and I would seriously consider switching platforms.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wordpress time?

byron smith said...

Well I'm very tempted (and have been for some time), though my main hesitation is that my blog has quite a few internal links (you may have noticed...), and it would be a real shame to lose these during transfer and end up with thousands of dead links. So a requirement of switching would be some kind of automated process to take the archived copy of the blog (which includes all comments) available through the export function I mentioned and change all the internal links from http://nothing-new-under-the-sun/[date and post name] to http://[newaddress]/[date and post name]. I guess I could just run it through Microsoft Word with a find a replace...

But this wouldn't quite work, since it seems that Wordpress post addresses include not just the month, but the date of posting. I guess it would work if importing a blog lead to the creation of posts that only had a month stamp, not a date stamp. Does this make sense?

byron smith said...

find *and* replace

(Comment editing is one of the many attractive features to Wordpress...)

Anonymous said...

Yes it does make sense, or at least more sense than it did the first time I read it.

I'm unaware of any software that will do this automatically. Might be worth emailing the support team at Wordpress and asking them. I've always found them to be helpful.

byron smith said...

Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it when I get a chance (which won't be in the next couple of weeks).

Jeremy said...

Sorry I haven't pitched in earlier. I'm planning a migration from wordpress.com to a self-hosted wordpress.org in the coming months and discovered quite a little treasure cache of importing tools. I've bookmarked a few "blogger tools for Byron" including one that fixes links...

byron smith said...

Jeremy - that looks awesome. We'll have a chat some day about wordpress.com vs .org (assume I know nothing and you'll be on safe ground). Of course, you are generating more work for me by making this look do-able...