The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners, who publish multiple blogs with different subjects, may decide that some subjects would be better discussed in a different blog. With various posts published in one blog, the owner may decide that those posts should be published in a different blog, to continue discussion. The question now is how to move posts, from one blog to another? The dashboard "Export / Import" feature, which is now labeled "Import & back up" , lets us copy pages and posts from one blog to another. Just copying all pages and posts, though, will create problems with duplicated content.

This month, we are again seeing evidence of recent security changes by Microsoft . We see signs of continued frustration, in the process of publishing comments - and publishing posts, as part of the Import process. In the process of diagnosing an apparent comment publishing problem, I ventured into the comment publishing experience, yet again.

One of the most useful skills, when maintaining and publishing a blog, is backing up the content. As you publish a blog, it's a very good idea to periodically backup the content - comments, pages, and posts. Sometimes, backed up content may save you hours of anguish.

Not all blog owners understand the connection between page / post import, and spam limitation. We see the occasional question, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about page / post import, and daily publishing limits. Why I can not import content, to my blogs? Note that "Automatically publish" is selected , in the blog discussed here.

Blog owners who need to export blog content are reporting confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I'm trying to export my blog, but when I click "Settings > Other", there is no "Export" option! Not all blog owners realise that the "Export" wizard is now "Back up". Changes in functionality may perplex blog owners, too.

Some blogs can't be easily upgraded, from a Classic to Layouts / Designer template. The Classic to Layouts / Designer upgrade can't process all classic templates. Some HTML tweaks, made by the blog owners, just can't be easily translated into CSS / HTML / XML, in the Layout / Designer templates. Remember that before Layouts templates, all accessories and decorations were installed by editing the template. It's likely that some people created some tricky code, to provide interesting features - and some of the tweaks, that are known by the owners, may cause the delay in upgrading.

Some blog owners - weary of the restrictions, and lack of options and features, decide that WordPress is not part of their future - and are moving to Blogger. An important part of changing from WordPress to Blogger publishing is the process of moving the existing blog content. You can import WordPress content into a new Blogger blog - or use an existing Blogger blog. If you are migrating a WordPress domain to Blogger , you'll want to transfer the content, first.

Every month in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we see another blog owner, trying to import and publish. Why is it taking so dang long? I started yesterday - it's just spinning, and getting nowhere! This blog owner is not having a good time, importing posts.

The ability to copy comments and posts into a blog - and even between blogs - is a useful option in Blogger. Some blog owners take the "Export Blog" / "Import Blog" wizards too casually. Most computer owners enjoy multitasking - and multitasking, between various online activities which involve your personal involvement, can increase productivity. The process of importing comments and posts, into a Blogger blog, does not involve your personal involvement - and does not work well during multitasking. Multitasking will actually slow the import process down - and what might take mere minutes can take hours, or days.

Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , we see the naive query How do I merge my two blogs, using Export / Import? When given the simple advice Use the "Export blog" and "Import blog" wizards, both in the dashboard Settings - Other menu. the immediate response is I don't have that menu item! This person has, most likely, lost control of the Blogger account. In order to avoid encouraging scraping of blog contents, both the Export and Import wizards are only available to blog administrators. Not everybody wishing to use "Export blog" has blog ownership, however.

We see signs of naivete, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , from blog owners concerned with malware / spam deletions, and with other unexplained disasters in Blogger. How do I backup my blog, to protect the contents against unfair spam deletions? Not many concerned blog owners realise the first principle of backups, known by any experienced network administrator. Never plan a backup, without first planning the restore. How you backup your blog depends upon several details. What problem do you expect, to require a backup? How do you plan to recover, from a problem?

Recently, people who use the popular Multiply blogging platform were given bad news . From December 1st, we will unfortunately no longer be able to support Multiply in its current form - notably we will be removing the social networking and content sharing part of Multiply (photos, videos, blogs, social messaging, etc.). We have decided to discontinue providing and hosting these services, as we have concluded that other Internet sites who are committed to social networking services will do a better job serving you than we can. They are, right now, unsure what options they can offer, to help existing Multiply blogs be transitioned to alternatives such as Blogger. We're still finalising the exact list of formats and platforms that we'll export to, but users will be able to download all their original media and data, (in some flexible formats) and also able to migrate directly to alternative blogging platforms. So, let's see what options Blogger Engineering can offer. Watc...

Occasionally, we see evidence of wistful thinking in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . How do I make an exact copy of my blog, to another URL? This should be a simple enough task - but it's not.

One of the features of blogs, which a lot of blog owners seem to take for granted, is the maintaining of the posts and structure of the blog. With a static website, you design the URL structure, and you publish the pages in the website to the URLs as you wish. If you link the various pages to each other, this requires that you keep a glossary, of the URL of each page. The larger your website gets, the more painful a task this becomes. Make a mistake with one URL, and you have a broken link. Search engines don't like broken links - so if you want your website to be featured in search result pages, you want to minimize broken links.

When you export the contents of your blog , so you can import them to another blog, you will export all posts, without any choice. If you import repeatedly to any blog, and you publish posts automatically, you will end up with duplicate posts. In almost all cases, you will find it best to not select " Automatically publish all imported posts ", when importing.

Occasionally, some blog owners will get the urge to clean up the comments and posts in a blog, Maybe the idea is to make the blog easier to read, or to make it easier to find important posts. As in "spring cleaning" where we move everything out of a room in our house, so to clean the room completely, a blog owner may try exporting then re-importing all comments and posts.

Last year, Blogger announced an exciting improvement in Blogger blogs - the ability to export and import blog content (comments / posts) between Blogger blogs (as long as you have administrative access to both blogs). At the time, that was interesting, but not so useful, as only Blogger blog content was supported by the process.

For a long time, blog owners have been asking for the ability to transfer blog contents - comments and posts - from blog to blog. Last week, Blogger announced that feature recently added to Production Blogger. Today’s release features a brand new graduate from the Blogger in Draft testing ground: Import and Export for Blogger blogs.

It's a very good idea to backup your blog , periodically. Making a mirror copy of the blog, on a local computer that you control, is a good idea for many reasons. You also might like to make a printed copy of the blog. If you would simply like to print off your blog to paper, to save the text of the posts, here is code that will let you extract a selection of updates.