Switching to Blogger Beta

Today is the day (I think) that I'm switching my blog over to the beta of the new Blogger. I am uncertain about how this whole conversion will go for the Blogger system, and that's been making me a little worried lately. I have 847 posts, many with pictures, in this blog and I'd hate to lose them.

Since Blogger doesn't have any way to back up your blog that I know of, I had to go out and find it on my own. Movable Type to the rescue!!! In Jen's blog's help, I found a way to export all of one's blogger entries to a file. The intent there was to allow you to migrate over to Movable Type, but I'm just going to use it as a backup mechanism. It seems like it will be pretty easy and fast. I know I could have copied each entry to a big long Word Doc (thanks FO), but I think this will be faster. I DO NOT want to lose all this work. I've been blogging since February 23, 2005 - and a year and a half is a long time! If I lost all my entries, I'd cry. This is my diary after all and I hold some hope that my grandkids or someone will want to read it some day. Granted, all the things I post from YouTube and Digg will be worthless by then, but the real writing will hopefully be of interest.

So, with thanks to Six Apart, here's the procedure: (refined a lot by me)

1) Open Notepad or your favorite plain text editor. Don't use Microsoft Word or anything that will add formatting to the code.

2) Log into your Blogger account, and on your dashboard, click the blue gear icon for "Change Settings."

3) Then click the Template tab.



4) Copy your current template to Notepad and save it; you will be replacing your Blogger template with the backup template below, but you probably don't want to lose your original template. :)

Replace your Blogger template with the text in this file. I can't post the actual template code here because Blogger's system wants to parse it and by doing so strips out important parts that you need to see. Silly Blogger! :)

5) Save the template changes and re-publish your blog. You will end up with a web page showing your most recent posts, but also with links to all the months that you have posts. Click on each of the months that you want to save and choose File, Save As in your browser. Save the files to your hard drive. You can use the suggested name or make up your own. While the suggested name would probably be fine, I prefer something that will keep my files organized. I used names like "2006_10 October.htm". See?



6) Once you've saved the months you want, put your original template back and re-publish again to get things back to normal.

That's it! Now you have a backup of your Blogger blog. If you ever had to, you could look at the files in Notepad or Wordpad and copy the BODY section of a particular post back into Blogger. Viola!

Now, let's see if I'm brave enough to switch over to the beta...