Link to the contact form can be found below the header, at the moment there are links to Home (main page) and Contact form.
Showing posts with label page. Show all posts
Showing posts with label page. Show all posts
Monday, June 11, 2012
3
Contact Form added
I added a new page containing a contact form to this blog. I use EmailMeForm service, which I already have used before in another blog of mine. EmailMeForm is free up to 200 form submissions per month and up to 5 different forms.
Link to the contact form can be found below the header, at the moment there are links to Home (main page) and Contact form.
Link to the contact form can be found below the header, at the moment there are links to Home (main page) and Contact form.
Monday, October 24, 2011
19
Backup your Blogspot blogs!
"Yes, I know, I should backup my blog more often, but..."
It is so difficult? If something goes wrong and your blog is lost, do you have anything (besides your memory, Google cache and maybe Web archive) to salvage your posts?
If your answers were "Yes" and "No", read on. I'll show you how to ease the pain of backing up Blogspot blogs.
What should you back up?
Blogger has a function for exporting and importing a blog. This export format (XML) contains all blog's posts and all comments of posts. So it is good to backup this export file. But this might not be enough.
Sometimes a single post may become corrupted. It may be overkill to restore that from an export file. Blog posts are stored in the blog feed, from which it is quite easy to pick single posts. So you may want to backup the blog feed, too.
Many bloggers have customized their blog's template and widgets. So full template html/XML should be backed up, too, and also the widget's data.
Last, but not least, your pictures and other media files. If you or some bug accidentally delete your Picasa Web Album or Google+ album for you blog pictures, they are gone from your blog. I feel a lot safer, if pictures are backed up, too.
How to do it?
When you are logged in, there are four urls you can use to backup your blog:
Export file url: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/BLOGID/archive
Blog feed url: http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false&max-results=500
Template: http://www.blogger.com/html?blogID=BLOGID&action=download
You need to fix BLOGID and YOURBLOGNAME in these urls.
Backing up widgets using Blogger UI is laborious: you should click edit for each widget, copy its contents and store locally. I wanted something easier. And luckily I found a way to back up all widgets' data in one file, I think this is undocumented feature, but as long as it works, it is good for this purpose.
All widgets: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/BLOGID/widgets
Your blog posts probably have media files, images at least. I found at least two good ways to back up media from blog, both use Firefox web browser: FireUploader and DownThemAll!.
FireUploader is great for downloading your Picasa Web Albums to your local computer. If you have all your pictures in Picasa Web Albums, this might be a good choice. FireUploader logs in your Picasa account, displays albums as folders, and you can easily download singe files, single folders, multiple files and multiple folders from your Picasa Web Albums. Also upload and other services besides Picasa are supported.
DownThemAll! can be used to extract all media from RSS feeds. So, you can extract images from your Picasa Web Album, and also directly from your blog feed! Using blog feed as the source ensures, that all images in posts, also from different galleries (Picasa, Imageshack, Photobucket, etc), will be downloaded.
If you have some good solutions for Chrome, Internet Explorer and/or Opera for downloading media files, please leave a comment. :)
Update: Google Takeout is very good tool for backing up Picasa Web albums, too, see these comments.
Of course you can also install Picasa and use it to download you Picasa Web Albums.
Blog Backup Helper Gadget
If you have many blogs, then you have many sets of urls you need to download. Under linux you could script the whole thing and download xml/rss backups using wget. Although using linux, I did something different: coded a little javascript helper gadget, which can be installed in my (and your) blogs. It hides itself, when logged in user is not blog admin. When blog admin is logged in, it shows the four download links (export, feed, template, widgets). This same gadget works in different operating systems and in different browsers (tested on: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE).
Go to Design|Page Elements. Click Add Gadget in your side bar area. Select HTML/Javascript. Here are the contents of the gadget:
I suggest you place this gadget as last gadget in your sidebar.
Blog Backup Helper, page version
Maybe you don't want to load backup gadget code on every page load into your sidebar. Then you can create a (hidden) page and put backup helper code there. Create a new page, called Backup, and paste this code in html edit:
Restore strategies
Hopefully you'll/I'll never have to go here, but I outline some strategies for restoring data.
1. Restore single post HTML from blog feed backup
2. Restore single or multiple deleted posts and their comments by importing blog export file
3. Restore corruped template and/or widget using template backup and/or widgets backup
4. Restore deleted blog by restoring template, restoring widget data, importing blog export file
5. Restore deleted media files: re-upload files, fix references in your posts to new urls
Widget export file contains all widgets, with their html codes escaped. One easy way to copy widget codes from the file is to unescape the file contents, for example using un-escape tool, then copy/paste.
It is so difficult? If something goes wrong and your blog is lost, do you have anything (besides your memory, Google cache and maybe Web archive) to salvage your posts?
If your answers were "Yes" and "No", read on. I'll show you how to ease the pain of backing up Blogspot blogs.
What should you back up?
Blogger has a function for exporting and importing a blog. This export format (XML) contains all blog's posts and all comments of posts. So it is good to backup this export file. But this might not be enough.
Sometimes a single post may become corrupted. It may be overkill to restore that from an export file. Blog posts are stored in the blog feed, from which it is quite easy to pick single posts. So you may want to backup the blog feed, too.
Many bloggers have customized their blog's template and widgets. So full template html/XML should be backed up, too, and also the widget's data.
Last, but not least, your pictures and other media files. If you or some bug accidentally delete your Picasa Web Album or Google+ album for you blog pictures, they are gone from your blog. I feel a lot safer, if pictures are backed up, too.
How to do it?
When you are logged in, there are four urls you can use to backup your blog:
Export file url: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/BLOGID/archive
Blog feed url: http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false&max-results=500
Template: http://www.blogger.com/html?blogID=BLOGID&action=download
You need to fix BLOGID and YOURBLOGNAME in these urls.
Backing up widgets using Blogger UI is laborious: you should click edit for each widget, copy its contents and store locally. I wanted something easier. And luckily I found a way to back up all widgets' data in one file, I think this is undocumented feature, but as long as it works, it is good for this purpose.
All widgets: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/BLOGID/widgets
Your blog posts probably have media files, images at least. I found at least two good ways to back up media from blog, both use Firefox web browser: FireUploader and DownThemAll!.
FireUploader is great for downloading your Picasa Web Albums to your local computer. If you have all your pictures in Picasa Web Albums, this might be a good choice. FireUploader logs in your Picasa account, displays albums as folders, and you can easily download singe files, single folders, multiple files and multiple folders from your Picasa Web Albums. Also upload and other services besides Picasa are supported.
DownThemAll! can be used to extract all media from RSS feeds. So, you can extract images from your Picasa Web Album, and also directly from your blog feed! Using blog feed as the source ensures, that all images in posts, also from different galleries (Picasa, Imageshack, Photobucket, etc), will be downloaded.
If you have some good solutions for Chrome, Internet Explorer and/or Opera for downloading media files, please leave a comment. :)
Update: Google Takeout is very good tool for backing up Picasa Web albums, too, see these comments.
Of course you can also install Picasa and use it to download you Picasa Web Albums.
Blog Backup Helper Gadget
If you have many blogs, then you have many sets of urls you need to download. Under linux you could script the whole thing and download xml/rss backups using wget. Although using linux, I did something different: coded a little javascript helper gadget, which can be installed in my (and your) blogs. It hides itself, when logged in user is not blog admin. When blog admin is logged in, it shows the four download links (export, feed, template, widgets). This same gadget works in different operating systems and in different browsers (tested on: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE).
Go to Design|Page Elements. Click Add Gadget in your side bar area. Select HTML/Javascript. Here are the contents of the gadget:
I suggest you place this gadget as last gadget in your sidebar.
Blog Backup Helper, page version
Maybe you don't want to load backup gadget code on every page load into your sidebar. Then you can create a (hidden) page and put backup helper code there. Create a new page, called Backup, and paste this code in html edit:
Restore strategies
Hopefully you'll/I'll never have to go here, but I outline some strategies for restoring data.
1. Restore single post HTML from blog feed backup
2. Restore single or multiple deleted posts and their comments by importing blog export file
3. Restore corruped template and/or widget using template backup and/or widgets backup
4. Restore deleted blog by restoring template, restoring widget data, importing blog export file
5. Restore deleted media files: re-upload files, fix references in your posts to new urls
Widget export file contains all widgets, with their html codes escaped. One easy way to copy widget codes from the file is to unescape the file contents, for example using un-escape tool, then copy/paste.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
40
Blogger posts from feed in chronological order
A while ago I did my Chronological post order hack, which simply reverses the order of the posts on the screen using javascript. That can be used to read the whole blog from start to end, like this.
Adam has in his Too Clever By Half blog a different solution that uses 3rd party services to manipulate and reverse the feed to be displayed in chronological order, but there are drawbacks in using (free) third party services.
A while ago the Blogger dynamic views were announced. Dynamic views use javascript and AJAX to read from blog feed, and display the entries.
All these things made me think, if the whole reversing thing could be done in Blogger, reading the feed and manipulating it by javascript, without third party services. And it could, I yesterday figured it out, see a demo here. I'll show you how you can do it. It is actually quite easy (once the code is ready), no template editing, for example.
Create a new page
Create a new page in your blog. Name it as you like. Edit the post as HTML (important!), and paste this code into it:
There are some configurable values in the script, which should be self explanatory. If you want, for small blogs you can display all entries on the same page (tested with ~200 entries). The maximum number of entries that this script can display is 500, because of limitations in Blogger feeds. The actual amount may be lower, and it depends how many entries are left in your blog's RSS feed and some Google caches (includeHistoricalEntries). You cannot know, before you try. Formatting of the posts' header and footer is very basic, you can make it better if you want, add social buttons, etc.
Save and test. You can see it in action here: Chronological post order from feed demo.
Not everything can be displayed, for example dynamic content that is generated by javascript. This is a limitation of (Blogger) feeds. That is why some code examples (pastebin.com snippets) don't show in the demo. If you need to display javascript content, too, then you'll better use the other chronological post order hack.
Reference: Google Feed API.
Update March 22th: Google loader no longer need API key. Article and code snippets simplified. Thanks to Adam who tipped me about this in comments. :)
Adam has in his Too Clever By Half blog a different solution that uses 3rd party services to manipulate and reverse the feed to be displayed in chronological order, but there are drawbacks in using (free) third party services.
A while ago the Blogger dynamic views were announced. Dynamic views use javascript and AJAX to read from blog feed, and display the entries.
All these things made me think, if the whole reversing thing could be done in Blogger, reading the feed and manipulating it by javascript, without third party services. And it could, I yesterday figured it out, see a demo here. I'll show you how you can do it. It is actually quite easy (once the code is ready), no template editing, for example.
Create a new page
Create a new page in your blog. Name it as you like. Edit the post as HTML (important!), and paste this code into it:
There are some configurable values in the script, which should be self explanatory. If you want, for small blogs you can display all entries on the same page (tested with ~200 entries). The maximum number of entries that this script can display is 500, because of limitations in Blogger feeds. The actual amount may be lower, and it depends how many entries are left in your blog's RSS feed and some Google caches (includeHistoricalEntries). You cannot know, before you try. Formatting of the posts' header and footer is very basic, you can make it better if you want, add social buttons, etc.
Save and test. You can see it in action here: Chronological post order from feed demo.
Not everything can be displayed, for example dynamic content that is generated by javascript. This is a limitation of (Blogger) feeds. That is why some code examples (pastebin.com snippets) don't show in the demo. If you need to display javascript content, too, then you'll better use the other chronological post order hack.
Reference: Google Feed API.
Update March 22th: Google loader no longer need API key. Article and code snippets simplified. Thanks to Adam who tipped me about this in comments. :)
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