Every Blogger Should Know This

A few days ago, some friends asked if I knew how to back-up a Blogger blog. Like this one. I did some reasearch, and behond, I will now share it with you.

Things to note:
#1: there is no way to export your blog, so there is no way to import your blog. This means that if even if you back up your blog, you would still have to re-enter all the info by hand if things went awry.
#2: Because of #1, there's no reason to use a difficult method. Anything that does the job works, and this here idea does the job the easiest.

Here we go...


1) Make certain that your archive is both listed in the sidebar and set to "hierarchy" mode (in layout, edit the archive, and choose "hierarchy"). It's the one that lists the years, then the months, etc.

2) On your main page, at the sidebar archive, click on the year that you first started blogging here at this blog on Blogger -- the earliest year listed.

3) In the URL window, you'll see something long and crazy like this: http://blog.jbwolfer.com/search?updated-min=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max=2008-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=14
(colour and emphasis added for reference) Basically, when you clicked on the year, it did a search for all posts between 2007-01-01 and 2008-01-01, with the max results shown per page as 14. What you want to do is go up to that URL and change the date/year listed after "updated-max" to something in the future (like 2010), and list the max-results to something greater than the number of posts you have. (I think that you're limited to 3000 entries. Try not to go over that.) Press Enter and then it will return all your blog entries in full all on one huge page (scroll down to check). (See here exactly what I mean on my personal page.)


4) Now, go to File (or whatever you Mac freaks have), and save as a complete web page. Not an archived webpage (though I think that's just a Windows abomination). Go check it out, and you'll see that you downloaded all of your visible pictures, your links are all active, your text is just the way it should be, the background and styles are intact. It looks just the way it should. If ever you need to reapply, well, you'll have a lot of work ahead of you.

5) In the future, you can use this process of manually tweaking the search results to just grab 6 months (or whatever) and have a regular serial backup. Just change the update-min date as well since you don't need to get the stuff you already backed up.

The downside is that you won't be able to save the comments in this way. Unless you're really handy. For Beta Blogger (the current one), there is a thing called the Peek-a-boo Comments Hack that shows your available comments. I personally don't like my comments to show up on my main page, so I'm not willing to implement this code just for my backups.

Also, your images listed on the page are smaller than what you originally downloaded. They are all clickable hotlinks, and though the links are preserved, if you want to backup the original size, you'll have to do that wherever it's saved online. Blogger uses Picasa to save your images. You don't have to be able to run the software Picasa to access PicasaWeb and your images. In fact, Blogger's image upload system is so clunky and opaque, you should occasionally go and have a look around with what they're saving there. Sometimes we've had issues uploading images to where it doesn't get far enough that it appears on the post, but the information did get uploaded to the server and is uselessly taking up my server space. I delete the ones that nothing is linking to. On the other hand, you always want to upload your images (for the blog) via the Blogger upload script so you get a clean link when people click. Try it: in your blog, click on a photo you've uploaded. It will take you to a page of only your image -- no links to other images in your picasa album. But if you uploaded via picasa and clicked on the photo in your blog, it would take you to a busy page in your Picasa album, allowing anyone to browse what else you might have there (in your public pictures). But that's just free information. Use it as you please.

In an ideal world, Blogger will one day implement an export feature. Until then, I hope that you find this helpful.

Ribbed for Her Pleasure

I have a large black trash bag filled with silver fleece (from a silver Jacob sheep, not from the lesser known quest of Jason and the Argonauts). It is straight off the sheep Babe from down the lane last shearing season. It's got all sorts of gross things stuck in it as well as a serious coating of lanolin. Kira and I had this great idea that we would clean, dye, card and felt this fleece ourselves. With the difficulty in washing the fleece and the lack of affordable wool carders, I decided that we'd hold off on this project and skip ahead a few steps.

I love felted knitting, so when Kira and I were last at HobbyCarp, I bought some wool yarn. Every type of wool yarn they had was ultra-wonderful. They didn't have anything for me to knit and then intentionally ruin in the washing machine. It was all about the same price, so I purchased based on colour and came home with 50g of a lovely sage green merino wool. I immediately made a swatch, gave it a vigorous washing with Fels Naphta and pent up aggression, and was disappointed to see nothing happen. No felting. I looked again at the label, and finally saw the kiss of death: "Machine Washable." Great. Now I had all of this wool yarn that won't felt. So I made a hat. I had never before made anything other than scarves that quickly died in their infancy, but as long as I have the Internet, I can learn to do anything. All day Saturday I worked on the above hat. It turned out nearly perfect, and even fit me (though it didn't change the fact that I look dreadful in a hat). It was a bit loose, and my big hair needs a hat with a fierce grip, so I tossed it into the washing machine with the next load of laundry.

Behold!
As you can see, it felted. So now I have a 4.5 x 4.5 x 1.75-inch felt bowl. I really like the ribbed edge.

Cute and Edible like Baby Toes

Earlier I posted here a non-food recipe and now I'm posting a non-recipe food. These aren't so much about cooking as they are about crafting.
I don't normally go for cutesy, but these make me want to squeal, they are so cute. Bakerella is a genius. They're cake! On lolly sticks! No special pans needed.

These I think would lovely at a wedding shower (or a pink baby shower) with long sticks and popped into a vase. The recipe is here (as the premise remains the same no matter what kind of cake you make -- Red Velvet looks cool too!)