Comments on: How can I make a local archive of my blogspot?

Question: How can I make a local archive of my blogspot?

saketini99 — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:09:13 -0800

Can someone recommend a simple method or app for making monthly local archives of web-based blogs? In my case, the site is blogger, the save location is on a Mac.

By: mikewas

mikewas — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:30:21 -0800

In the terminal window, run:

wget -m "http://example.com/blog/"

Do this monthly.

More info on wget: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~bioskill/MAN/wget.html

By: bcwinters

bcwinters — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:32:21 -0800

Hmm, one way to do it would be to:

1. Turn on the Site Feed in the Blogger settings. Set it to "Full"
2. Run a newsreader on your Mac, such as NetNewsWire, and subscribe to the feed.
3. Set the newsreader to retain articles from the feed permanently.

By: electric_counterpoint

electric_counterpoint — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:59:39 -0800

I use a variation on Blogger's official method (mostly I just don't mess with some of the options it tells me to change), and then save the output as a .mht archive. I'm looking into mikewas's wget procedure, though.

By: saketini99

saketini99 — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:09:52 -0800

mikewas-
even though terminal scares me, I did as you suggested and got "command not found" as the result.

bcwinters-
wouldn't that just save the feed URL's, not the files themselves?

electric-
the official blogger method is way unwieldy.

I did a bit more searching and found a firefox extension that might do the trick called "slogger". You can find it here: http://www.kenschutte.com/firefoxext/

anybody have any experience with it yet?

By: starman

starman — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:48:55 -0800

If _monthly_ backup is really what you're after then this won't help much, but I will tell you there is a pretty good program called ecto that you can set up to publish off-line and upload the post to blogger (or various other blog systems). Even if you don't want to publish this way, you can run the program and have it download all your posts off the website. Then if you did lose them, you could publish them again automatically to wherever.
I think it's free for 21 days then you have to register after that.

By: AmbroseChapel

AmbroseChapel — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 21:32:13 -0800

Is wget installed on all Macs, even ones without the Developer Tools?

By: teece

teece — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 22:01:12 -0800

Mac's come with curl rather than wget for command line web downloading.

You can get wget from Fink, or you could compile it yourself and probably other methods, too.

(Or do 'man curl' in the terminal and figure out what the equivalent command line switch is for that program).

By: cptnrandy

cptnrandy — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 07:07:11 -0800

I user bloggers email function to email me a copy of everything I post, then use a Mail rule to identify it an put in a folder called "blogbackup".

By: adamrice

adamrice — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 07:35:45 -0800

bcwinters' approach is elegant and probably the one I would use. A program like NetNewsWire does cache the feed locally, so you've got a copy, and Atom is a useful format for archiving blogs.

If you want to use wget but don't want to get your fingers dirty with Unix, there's an app called Simple WGET that puts a relatively pretty face on it. Check macupdate.com.

By: saketini99

saketini99 — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:24:13 -0800

Thanks everyone and adamrice, I think I'll try the 2 methods you suggest and see which one works best. Thanks again!