Blog Birthday Nine

One more year of lazy blogging is passed. Looking back to this year I must say I have no excuses for writing less than one post per month. Far more better looking forward, I'll try doing something more next year: I have two Raspberry PI installations, at the moment, which are attracting my interest more of the "flatter" desktop computing world. So I hope you'll find something more interesting on this blog next year. Stay tuned ...

Blog-Birthday Eight (a bit late)

Here we are, again, another year of blogging is passed. In spite of my last year promise of being more proficuous blogger my post writing rate has been even lower. Doing things and writing about them takes time and I'm not having a lot of spare time ultimately. On the other hand doing things in Linux is becoming every day easier so there is also less to explain. So ... no more promises for next year just stay tuned!

Tips for (happily) backing up your i.ph blog

After talking with another i.ph blogger I tough it may be useful a short post on how I quickly backed up my i.pb blog posts. 

i.ph blog addresses

DotPH blogging platform is based on a proprietary platform called Calliope. Not a bad platform at all but a bit outdated today. Among many other problems Calliope doesn't provide it's users with any backup tool. During three years of blogging with i.ph platform I noticed that blog post can be accessed  from a dual address: one is the usual long permalink 

http://musante.i.ph/blogs/musante/2012/03/13/test-drive-ubuntu-1204-beta1-live/

the other is based on the post number

http://musante.i.ph/blogs/musante/?p=119

My backup solution

 Once i received the news about i.ph closing its free blogging service I looked for a program able to sweep all my post addresses and automatically downloading at least the page HTML. I discovered I could use a very flexible Firefox plug-in: DownThemAll . 

DownThemAll is a  plug-ins that works as a download manager for Firefox, among the many features it also allow to start a batch download of numbered items. Just what I needed!

All I had to do has been open the DownTemAll manager window and start a new download process (the plus button). I then configured the download process as shown in the screen-shot (sorry I only have an Italian screen-shot).

the numbers between square brackets are the start and end number post you're going to download while the pattern on the bottom (*url*-*inum*.*ext*) tells DownTemAll hot to name the downloaded files (musante.i.ph-001.htm and so on).

Some final notes

DotPH support promised an easy way to backup our blog content, I'm sure they'll come out soon with such solution but, since restoring a blog is a long work, better to start early.

My method only saves the page HTML file not images or any thing you may have linked in it. this is fine if you have your images hosted on another server (like, for example, fickr). If you have your images hosted on i.ph you'll have to save them separately. 

The hard, and boring, part comes with restoring your backed up posts. I'm doing it manually but I have only 117 post to restore on my new blog. If you have more It might be worth looking for an automated way of doing it.

I hope this can be useful. If you have any question, or suggestion, feel free of course to comment here.

A new beginning ...

 

The provider hosting my current blog, musante.i.ph, is shutting down its free blogging service. So here I am juggling between backing up the old blog and experimenting with the still unfamiliar blogger interface. Unfortunately i.ph people locked my blog for new content so I can't even properly inform my few readers of the changes in act. May be I should have started blogging on a more reliable host from the beginning but I really loved the fact of blogging from a Philippines domain and that short domain name!

By the way here I am, again, facing an empty blog like more than three years ago. I'm going to slowly restore the old musante.i.ph content and, even more slowly, posting new content like before.

Stay tuned!

(Update Apr. 24th)

At last I managed to finish the backup/restore process: all my posts, back to the very first hello world, are now on blogspot.

 (Update May 24th)

Since today my old blog "musante.i.ph" seems to be definitively down, its counter stopped beating at 36776 hits. I hope all my few reader managed to reach the new blog here on blogspot.

So long, i.ph, and thanks for all the fish!