Sunday, October 22, 2006

The day Blogger died



I’ve been doing this Blog for a couple of years now, and I was thinking the other day that this is really the closest I’ve ever come to a journal or diary in my life. As I started going over my past entries I realize that certain posts sparked memories of where I was and in what frame of mind I was at that time, which for me was kind of neat. One post in particular dealt with the day that Yahoo (May they rot in fucking cyber-hell) yanked my membership and deleted not only my yahoo groups membership but deleted all of my Yahoo email addresses and files. For a “term of service violation”, they had every right to do it, but Damn them for it. The lesson learned that day besides back up all yer stuff, is that nothing lasts forever, which is why I started thinking –what if I woke up one morning and Google decides to discontinue Blogger? My mind began working on a safeguard for my posts. What I came up with was Snag it. Snag it is a screen capture program that allows auto scrolling of a webpage and then can save it as a jpeg. This way I can go back over my monthly entries and save them month to month as jpegs. I can then burn them on a CD and I have a set of archives of all my witty posts and photos. There may be better ways, and if you know of any let me know as well, but for now this is at least something-which is better than doing nothing at all.

2 comments:

  1. I have each new post automatically forwarded to me in e-mail. That way I have at least the body of the post. Usually (but not always) the images get sent too.

    Blogger has a method to work around their lack of an export tool as well, check out http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41447.

    There are several options listed at http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com/2006/04/how-to-backup-your-blogger-blog.html as well, which you might find more useful.

    The problem with screen caps is that you can't get the actual data back out of them. If you ever needed to do a restore or move, you'd have no way to get the text itself without retyping.

    Good on ya for thinking about backups though, very few people do! Hopefully you won't ever need it, but it gives you a warm feeling in your stomach, like having a guaranteed 20 Saving Throw all saved up.

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  2. Anonymous9:46 AM

    Another useful tool is to use Mozilla Firefox, and save as complete web page. You will be able to recover all the graphics as original files, and the text buried in the HTML, but still machine readable.

    Oh, and it will save space in the end over the JPEG captures.

    -Wil

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