Retrieving The PostID, To Recover A Deleted Post

One of the challenges of using the Blogger "Edit Posts" menu (in the Classic Blogger GUI) or the "Posts" menu (in the New Blogger GUI) is the too easy ability to delete posts, if you are not thinking about what you're doing. Fortunately, under the right circumstances, accidental deletion of a single post won't cause a terrible catastrophe - though you (the blog owner) will need to react properly.

There are several ways to recreate or recover a post, after it's accidentally deleted from your blog. Only one way will let you recover the contents, published to the same URL as before.

• Recover from the blog feed, using scraped text.
• Recover from search engine cache, using scraped text.
• Recover from search engine cache, using the PostID.

The PostID, similar to the BlogID, is a non publicised identifier, which is attached to a post, when it's published to the host blog.

If you delete a post that's been cached by the search engines, you can retrieve the PostID from the cached content. Combining the BlogID and the PostID, you can directly access the Post editor display for the post itself, and re publish the post.

The previous post in this subject, Recovering A Deleted Post, was cached by the search engines some time ago. Doing a search engine cache search, I can find a cached copy of that post.

Looking at the source code for that page, as cached, I look for (some line breaks inserted, here)

<div class='post hentry'>
<a name='8899607620317019913'></a>
<h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
<a href='http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2012/01/recovering-deleted-post.html'>
Recovering A Deleted Post</a>
</h3>

There's the PostID

8899607620317019913

Adding the PostID and the BlogID, I can now access the post editor as

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=24069595&postID=8899607620317019913

From there, I simply

Publish Post

and my post, with all content and with the original URL, comes right back online.

If you have this problem, just do the same, and you will get the right results. I'll note that the post editor session, for a given blog, can only be used by a blog author or owner - this is not a security risk. Try my example, above, if you don't believe me.

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