Backup your blogs with BlogBackupOnline

Many people in the Internet community are bloggers. They may or may not admit it but most would have at least one blog. Additionally, many in this majority have more than one blog. A quick look at my blog will tell you that it is hosted by Blogger that is now owned by Google. I cannot for the mind of me understand why a blog backup service has not yet been implemented. With the expertise and resources available to this cyber-juggernaut, it is strange why something so essential is not available. Perhaps Google trusts its servers so much that they feel a backup service is simply redundant. I sure hope that the reality is indeed the case and so far, this seeming complacency is not exactly unwarranted. However, what if someone hacks in and ruins a particular blog? For the average blogger, it may be rather hard to recover his accumulated labor. I don't know for sure since nothing untoward has happened to my blog before (thank God) and I am not exactly keen to find out. But the what-if just can't help nagging at me. There are many ways to backup a blog - some tedious, some less-tedious; some useful; some less-useful. Google's official stance on backup is this . You can read the steps yourself but suffice to say that someone less geeky or dedicated to his blog (or lazy) would be likely put off. After roaming the web for a more ideal solution (this topic is not a new one after all), I found BlogBackupOnline at www.blogbackuponline.com . I was pleased with what I read and I signed up for an account myself. It is currently in beta and consequently free. The one drawback is the 50 MB limit - and there is no option of paid plans as yet. One way to get around this is to backup your text content only - minus the multimedia items like images and videos. If you are already hosting them on e.g. DivShare, Flickr, etc, then it is no issue at all. After you signed up for your account, you can opt to do a full backup followed by automatic daily ones for your new entries. The initial full backup is done behind the scene and run using BlogBackupOnline's own resources. There are only two things we need to do - (1) Sign up for the free account and (2) Agree to the default settings. It is that simple and something I would love to see included in Blogger. If you are uncomfortable with relying on BlogBackupOnline's servers, you can choose to export the data to your own hard drive as an xml file. The beauty of this solution is that it also allows you to restore your blog when need be with the click of a button. I have not experimented with this function yet but I read that it would require you to provide authentication details then (which is understandable). If you don't want to give away your login password, just change it before restoring your blog; then change it back when done. An alternative solution I quite like is to save your entire blog as a mht file. You will need Internet Explorer or a suitable intermediary for your non-IE browser. To get your entire blog on one page, first check your dashboard (if you are using Blogger) for your total number of posts. For my blog, there are current 90+ entries so I will just type e.g. http://lordwarwizard.blogspot.com/search?max-results=100 into my browser address bar. That would bring up all of my 90+ entries on one page for easy saving. Just replace the 100 in the link with a number larger or equal to your total post count. Also, remember to replace my blog address with yours. The catch is that when you have to restore your blog, you will need to do it manually. Just repost each entry one by one (ouch). So for now, I would recommend BlogBackupOnline - at least till it is no longer free or it closes down (God forbids). If you have other better solutions, please let me know. Till then. =)

How to make Amazon Context Links work in your Blogger blog

I had an uncomfortable time tearing my hair out with this problem. I followed the instructions to the letter yet cannot make it work. I even wrote Amazon about this but despite their prompt reply, it wasn't too helpful. After analyzing the source code and putting my unmeasurable brain power to the task, I finally figured that Amazon needed the information in the comment tags as well (the details between the comment tags were not showing under "View Source"). After all, the JavaScript script we are calling is a general one and they needed our affiliate ID. If it doesn't show on the source code, it will likely not work properly. It would actually be worse if it works since purchases will be made because of our site but we won't get the proper credit. :P So why won't the comments show? I tried a simple <!-- This is a comment. --> html test and to my surprise, it didn't show up in the source code as well. It struck me then that the template was in xml format and not the plain vanilla html. After doing some research, I realized that there are some special characters in xml that cannot be used in normal xml strings. I found at least 5. Namely, they are &, <, >, " and '. So it seems that for them to be used properly, we need to use their unicode versions. So if you need an ampersand &, use &amp; instead. If you need a left angular bracket <, use &lt; instead. If you need a right angular bracket >, use &gt; instead. If you need a double inverted comma ", use &quot; instead. If you need an apostrophe ', use &#39; instead. If you don't want to go through the hassle of changing it one by one, a nice person by the name of B.Suter has put up a free online converter at http://www.stanford.edu/~bsuter/js/convert.html that you can utilize. Note though that the form works for the 2 angular brackets only. After all, these are the ones usually causing the problem. So there, I went to my Template >> Edit HTML in blogger (beta) and pasted in the modified code for Amazon Context Links. The context links show up just fine now. ^^