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  Saturday, July 09, 2005

Back Up Your Blog!

Man, that was close. Tonight I added a badge to my sidebar, and when I saved the template with the change, it messed up and lost the last couple dozen lines of the template. (The template is like a recipe or stencil you make that tells Blogger what to wrap around your posts and other blog parts to make it look the way you want.)

Fortunately, I had backed up my template about a week ago, and so I pulled the missing lines from my backup and patched my template. If you use Blogger, backing up your template is easy. Go to the template editor, click inside the edit box, select all the text (ctrl-a does it), copy it to the clipboard (ctrl-c), then open up Notepad or another text editor and paste the template from the clipboard to the editor and save it as a file. (Obviously, these are for Windows users. If you have a Mac, you're on your own. I'm Mac-plegic.)

I also back up my entire blog. I've used computers long enough to not trust them. Blogger has instructions in the help for backing up the blog, involving a change to your template, but I just publish to an FTP server and then copy the files via FTP to my computer. If Blogger blew up, I could theoretically scrape all the posts out of the files and port them to another blog service. In fact, I've got a blog scraper kinda working now, I use it to add links to the posts in the sidebar calendar.

Now to bed. It's been a long day.


Blog Tag: Chatter

3 Comments:

At 7/09/2005 4:53 AM, Blogger Lisa said...

Good plan :) If you design at all, it's a good plan. If you juggle several blogs, it's a good idea, too. It's easy to make a change to the wrong one. I've done it.

Have a great weekend!!

 
At 7/09/2005 10:12 AM, Blogger Melissa said...

Welcome to LA! Perfect weather, huh? Just don't get sick, you might end up in my hospital. :)

Thanks for the detailed back-up advice. I was unclear before, how to do it exactly.

I set up my blog last night. My first post is planned for July 15. I want to wait until I'm back from vacation to launch it. (I'm not leaving town because you're here. It's just a coincidence. Really.)

I hope that you enjoy your stay and that your sister-in-law is healing well.

 
At 7/09/2005 7:23 PM, Blogger Michelle said...

Smart cookie Dave!

 

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