I think I just did something incredibly stupid

Marilyn Braun

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This morning I was trying to import files from Blogger into Word press and it's basically destroyed my blogger account. I'm close to tears because I've put so much work into that blog and I didn't intend on shutting down the Blogger blog, just keeping the same files and putting them on another site, while maintaining marilynsroyalblog.

I don't know what to do here, can someone please help me? I just feel completely sick at the moment.

The postings still look like they're in my archive on blogger. Do I have to go in and publish all of my postings to recreate it?

*************************************

Okay, I copied a new template into the blog - I didn't save the old template (stupid me), but at least the files are still there and the blog has a semblance of looking like the previous version. All of the links are gone, stat counter code, meta, everything! But at least the files are still there.

I put so much work into this blog that I don't want to lose it. At least not until I'm ready to start up a webpage - maybe this is a sign? I don't know.
 
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MarkPettus

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Marilyn,

I'm not sure what the problem is. I looked at your blog and found posts from today and posts in the archives from last March... Have you already fixed the problem?
 

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MarkPettus said:
Marilyn,

I'm not sure what the problem is. I looked at your blog and found posts from today and posts in the archives from last March... Have you already fixed the problem?

I found a cached version of the page and copied the code from that. So that part is fixed. Now I can't seem to post any new articles onto the site. Does this have something to do with copying a cached page?

If so, is there a way to fix this? There are two current articles that don't show up and in the future I'd like to post more. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

I've just tried to click on the various archives and they don't come up at all. It stays with the current page articles, which I don't want. I still want the archives to show up as well. How do I go about doing this without losing the setup that I have?
 
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When you say you copied a a cached page, do you mean you copied the html into the Template on Blogger? Or what?

I'm about to go out the door for an appointment, but I'll check back later. If you haven't solved it, email me the Template html.

Lisa
 

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Medievalist said:
When you say you copied a a cached page, do you mean you copied the html into the Template on Blogger? Or what?

I'm about to go out the door for an appointment, but I'll check back later. If you haven't solved it, email me the Template html.

Lisa

Yes, I took the cached page, went into the source and I copied the code from that. It was mainly to get the set up (links, etc) since trying to set it all up from scratch would have been A LOT of work and I don't remember all of the code that I used to make up the links to the various sites. Nor do I remember everything that I added, like links and stuff. It's better than nothing, which is what I had before this point.

I don't know if I messed it up further, I'm just happy that I have the set up back. I'm hoping that the archive links can be fixed along with my being able to post at a future date.

If you go into source you should be able to see exactly what I've done.
 

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Marilyn Braun said:
This morning I was trying to import files from Blogger into Word press and it's basically destroyed my blogger account.

Okay, first things first - keep calm.

All you've done is over-write your template - this isn't a big deal. Your data is the important part, and if you can still see it in the interface, it's still safe and sound on Blogger's servers.

Go back into Blogger, pick the template you had before from the list, and republish it, and everything should be back to normal working order. Once you've got that bit working, you can go back in and add the necessary stats counters and links back in piece by piece.

Don't bother copying old versions of the page from the cache - it'll just be a static webpage, without the tags and things that Blogger needs to insert your content into and make the page work - although you can ransack the code for things like linking information and stats tracking code, rather than having to remember what you had before.
 
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Marilyn Braun

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Okay, okay, it worked!!! - I LOVE you Richard :Hug2:

Actually I love all of you for your help!

Is there a chance that, since I imported the articles to wordpress, all of my articles might disappear if bloggers servers are updated? I know I'm not explaining that properly but I really need to know that my work isn't going anywhere - unless I want it to.

Also, the postings that I've made are on the far right of the page and they aren't spaced properly. I know this is an aesthetic question but is there something I can do to change that? It seems this is the case for all of my postings and I'd prefer not to have to go into 90 articles and change them all.
 
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Richard

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Is there a chance that, since I imported the articles to wordpress, all of my articles might disappear if bloggers servers are updated? I know I'm not explaining that properly but I really need to know that my work isn't going anywhere - unless I want it to

No. Blogger doesn't 'know' that you've done that in any event - you don't actually switch between services, WordPress just takes the outputted information you provide it and creates its own posts out of it. If Blogger pulls the plug on the server, sure, everything on the original Blogger site will disappear - but that's incredibly unlikely to happen. As far as I'm aware, they don't close dormant accounts. Double-check if you're concerned about it though.

Can't help specifically on the spacing thing because I don't have a Blogger account, but the spacing thing is because it's not inserting <p> paragraph breaks. This might be an option behind the scenes - look for something like 'convert line breaks' and it'll break them up with <br />. It's not as neat, but it'll give you the same effect.
 

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Thanks again Richard.

I'm just wondering about something else. Say, if someone has it set up to receive updates about my site, say bloglines for instance. If I go in and update the spacing on all of my articles, will 90+ updates be sent to these people?

I don't want to annoy anyone, I just want to make the articles easier to read. I can't stand it when someone has a single-spaced, no breaks inbetween, posting. I don't like reading them and I don't like the way they look.
 

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Probably, yes - but don't worry too much about it - Bloglines and other feed readers quite often show old posts as new after a glitch. Just don't make a habit of it, and your users will most likely blame their software. Either way, it's fairly trivial - in most cases, they'll only get the last ten or so updated anyway (unless your RSS feed has been specifically designed to serve up absolutely every post when polled - and that's not likely to be the case.)

If you've got anything set up to actually E-MAIL entries though (Blogger doesn't do this on its own, but there are services), turn that off for the duration.
 

Marilyn Braun

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My blog is back!

My blog is back!

With a combination of everyone's suggestions here, wordpress's help and some fiddling on my part, the blog is back to normal. The formatting was easy to fix, I just had to change a setting on the template and it returned to normal.

I do have to say that I'm impressed with wordpress and the way they handled this issue - very quick and friendly. I'm probably not going to use the import feature anytime soon, at least not without making a back-up of my template first, but otherwise I like the Wordpress blog template.

Phew!

Marilyn
 

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I'm glad your blog is back! Yay!!!!! :)

I have one comment that might help you if you have problems in the future.

There's a program called Blog (free) that allows you to type up your blog entries on your own computer and then publish them to Blogger, MoveableType, B2, or WordPress blogs (or your own format, too.) I like it because if something happens to the server, I've lost nothing - everything is intact on my computer. I can also back up the entries much easier.

It can also retrieve entries from WordPress, I believe, but Blogger only allows it to retrieve something like 20 entries, so it has limited ability to get existing entries off of those databases.

If you're interested in knowing more about this, you can read more about it and you can also ask questions at his forums.
 

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Marilyn Braun said:
My blog is back!


Super.

Now, copy the code from your Template and stash it somewhere safe. Maybe email to yourself.

It's always good, "just in case," to have a copy.
 

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Medievalist said:
Super.

Now, copy the code from your Template and stash it somewhere safe. Maybe email to yourself.

It's always good, "just in case," to have a copy.

That is a very good idea. following this advice I just that and put it safely in a special folder. Thank you for the tip.
You learn something every day on this forum.:)
 

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quidscribis said:
I'm glad your blog is back! Yay!!!!! :)

I have one comment that might help you if you have problems in the future.

There's a program called Blog (free) that allows you to type up your blog entries on your own computer and then publish them to Blogger, MoveableType, B2, or WordPress blogs (or your own format, too.) I like it because if something happens to the server, I've lost nothing - everything is intact on my computer. I can also back up the entries much easier.

It can also retrieve entries from WordPress, I believe, but Blogger only allows it to retrieve something like 20 entries, so it has limited ability to get existing entries off of those databases.

If you're interested in knowing more about this, you can read more about it and you can also ask questions at his forums.

Yes, I've just installed that. It's a great idea.

A few months back I started copying all of my blog articles into word documents so that if something ever happened to Blogger I wouldn't lose everything. I've been a bit remiss in that, it's a slow process having to copy and paste each article, but in the long run it's worth it.
 

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I probably wasn't very clear about Blog. With it, you write your entries in it, then click one button, and it automatically publishes to your Blogger, WordPress, MoveableType, or B2 blog. No other work on your part. Oh, except for categorizing it within your blog on your site - that doesn't transfer over. But there's no copying and pasting, so a lot less of a hassle.

At any rate, I'm glad you have things working and I hope you come up with a good system that works for you that includes you having backups of your entries. It's never fun to lose data.

ETA: OTOH, maybe you've already got all that figured out, I'm just tired, and I need to go to bed. I'll stop babbling now.
 

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Marilyn Braun said:
Yes, I've just installed that. It's a great idea.

A few months back I started copying all of my blog articles into word documents so that if something ever happened to Blogger I wouldn't lose everything. I've been a bit remiss in that, it's a slow process having to copy and paste each article, but in the long run it's worth it.

Most blogging systems, including Word Press, I think, I have way to click a special link, or a field where you can enter an email address and have blog entries automatically sent to that adddress. Use that feature to email yourself--and I'd have the entries sent to a web mail account (possibly in addition to a "normal" account) so that if your computer is struck by lightning you'll still have the entries.
 

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Alternatively, you can temporarily edit the RSS settings (either in the CMS or in the file itself) to spool out 100000 entries instead of 10 and import them into your client of choice that way.
 

Marilyn Braun

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Medievalist said:
Most blogging systems, including Word Press, I think, I have way to click a special link, or a field where you can enter an email address and have blog entries automatically sent to that adddress. Use that feature to email yourself--and I'd have the entries sent to a web mail account (possibly in addition to a "normal" account) so that if your computer is struck by lightning you'll still have the entries.

I've tried that through Blogger and it only sends an email link to the article and not the actual article itself. It would be much more helpful if it did.
 

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Richard said:
Alternatively, you can temporarily edit the RSS settings (either in the CMS or in the file itself) to spool out 100000 entries instead of 10 and import them into your client of choice that way.

Oh, that is clever, and lovely little subversively practical use of RSS.
 

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Marilyn Braun said:
I've tried that through Blogger and it only sends an email link to the article and not the actual article itself. It would be much more helpful if it did.

I might not be getting this right, so forgive me, but when I post on my blog (which is with Blogger) I get an email from "noreply-comment@blogger(dot)com" of my entire blog post, not just a link. I have no idea what I did to get that to happen. Is that what you're talking about wanting?
 

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Dawno said:
I might not be getting this right, so forgive me, but when I post on my blog (which is with Blogger) I get an email from "noreply-comment@blogger(dot)com" of my entire blog post, not just a link. I have no idea what I did to get that to happen. Is that what you're talking about wanting?

Really? Does this happen automatically when you make a posting? I'd love to know how you did that because that sounds very helpful.

Right now if I want to copy an article, I have to go into the article, copy all of the text, and then paste it into a word document. Sometimes I just take it off of the blog instead of having to open up each and every article and then save it.
 

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Marilyn Braun said:
Really? Does this happen automatically when you make a posting? I'd love to know how you did that because that sounds very helpful.

yep :) they're in my gmail inbox within seconds of publishing.
 

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Dawno said:
I might not be getting this right, so forgive me, but when I post on my blog (which is with Blogger) I get an email from "noreply-comment@blogger(dot)com" of my entire blog post, not just a link. I have no idea what I did to get that to happen. Is that what you're talking about wanting?

In the settings of blogger there is a thingy you can check on or off which says, if it is switched on blogger will send you a copy everytime a posting is made. Id not not know exactly on which settings page but it is there somewhere.