In this post,  I cover how to set up your google blog so that someone can type in your custom domain name (mine is blog.bluedei.com)  and it shows your Google Blogger blog (mine is bluedei.blogspot.com). In other words, if you had a google blog already and you bought a domain name of your own and want to use it instead, this is how you would do it.

In Part 2  I will show you how to point your blog in WordPress.com to another URL and you will see that it is not at all as easy or intuitive and it is also not free like blogger. If you want to redirect in wordpress.com you have to pay for it.

And in Part 3, I will explain how to set up an existing wordpress.com blog to point not only to a new URL, but to one that also has a wordpress blog that replaces the wordpress.com blog (and has been loaded with the same blog posts as on the old blog). This is very poorly covered in the wordpress.com documentation.

Part 4 covers how to redirect a self-hosted wordpress blog on a subdomain to another URL.  My husband did this with his deep.bluedei.com blog. He purchased TSCRobinson.com from godaddy and redirected his blog to this URL.

Intro:

I am using a subdomain blog.bluedei.com for this since we have the ability to create subdomains (we have a web host). I could also have just used bluedei.com but we have several blogs (such as my husband’s blog deep.bluedei.com , his fun blog drawn.bluedei.com and my blog clear.bluedei.com) so we use different subdomains.

If you just want to point to your own domain name (like my husband also uses tscrobinson.com) and you don’t have a hosting service, you can buy the name/URL, you don’t need a hosting service. See step 1 for the best way to do this.

When I first decided to write a blog, I knew I wanted to go with either Google Blogger or WordPress.com (both free), but I didn’t know which one had the best features, etc. So I set up a blog on on both Blogger and WordPress.com and worked with both of them to see what they had to offer. And after working with both of them, I realized that I may want to get my own domain and use self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.org instead since it offers more advanced features and gave me more things to play with and learn. So after studying these 3 choices, I decided on my own self-hosted WordPress blog.

But in the process, I ended up with duplicate blogs in different places. And since I had my own URL, I wanted to figure out how to allow someone to use my new domain name ( blog.bluedei.com) and point to an existing blog and in this case, I was testing my Google Blog bluedei.blogger.com.

Redirecting a Google Blogspot / Blogger Blog to a custom domain:

Basically, there are only 2 main things you will need to do to redirect a Google Blog. You need to create a CNAME record on your own host server domain (and possibly A records) in order to point your Google Blogger blog to your new domain (or in this case, subdomain, the domain name is just bluedei.com) and you will need to tell Google Blogger the new URL ( e.g. blog.bluedei.com).

1. Create a CNAME record (and possibly A records) on host server domain

TIP: If you also need to buy your new URL, do it when you set up your Blogger (step 2) and you can skip all this setup and go directly to step 2. It costs essentially the same as any other ($10/year) and they will automatically take care of setting the CNAME, etc. They use godaddy.com, which is what most people use anyway.  If you do this, you can skip the CNAME setup instructions and go directly to step #2 since you will have them set the CNAME  (and A records) for you at the time you set up Blogger to point to the new URL.

“The easiest way to register a domain is to buy your domain directly through Blogger. If you go this route, we’ll automatically configure all of your relevant DNS settings and attach your new domain to your existing blog immediately.”

Here is a link to blogger help that is specific for several of the common registrars (like godaddy.com etc)

TIP: If you have used the URL to point elsewhere in the past, be sure to delete (or have deleted) any existing CNAME entries for the URL you want to set up.

If you can create your own CNAME record and have your host name server you would follow the directions here that google blogger says (or give them this information and ask your host support to do it):

“# Log in to your account on your hosting service’s website, and go to the DNS management page. Since CNAME records are special Domain Name Service (DNS) records, they may be in sections such as DNS Management or Name Server Management. It’s possible that you will have to enable advanced settings to create a CNAME record.# Use the information in the following table when you create your CNAME record.
If your service requires you to enter server information directly into the DNS tables, the entry below needs to have a type CNAME associated with them.

Host Name/Alias  Value/Destination
www                        ghs.google.com

* This is the part of your website?s address that you designated. For instance, if you chose www.mydomain.com as the address, www is the host name.”

I was not able to edit my own CNAME records so I just contacted my  inmotionhosting.com support and they set it up for me.  I told them to set the CNAME for blog.bluedei.com to ghs.google.com (specifically, “blog.bluedei.com IN CNAME ghs.google.com).

If you just have the URL, you would contact the company (i.e. we used godaddy.com) to set up a CNAME.

Additionally, if you are using a “naked domain” (like bluedei.com instead of a subdomain like blog.bluedei.com), you need to create the following “A” name records so you can use www.bluedei.com as well as just bluedei.com.

• Create ‘A’ NAME records for your naked domain (blog.com)

Creating A records for your naked domain is important as it allows Google to redirect people who use in your naked domain name (blog.com) to your blog page (www.example.com). If you do not do this, visitors who leave off the www will see an error page.

There are four separate A records you will create, and can be done from the same control panel you accessed your CNAME records. Simply point your naked domain (example.com, without the ‘www’) to each of the following IP addresses:

216.239.32.21

216.239.34.21

216.239.36.21

216.239.38.21

2. Setting Google Blogger to point to your new URL

Go to the Settings tab and then pick the Publishing tab. At the top where it says “Publish on blogspot” you will see Switch to custom domain. Click on the custom link to tell Google you will be wanting to redirect your blog. The “custom” will change to “blogspot.com”

TIP: At any time, you can switch back to your free google blog by clicking on blogspot.com which will direct it back to your free Google blog.

TIP: This is when/where you buy your new URL if you need one. Click on the  Need a domain? “Buy one now” under advanced settings.Now we need to tell Blogger the new URL that we want to use. We do this by going to the next section on the page (Advanced Settings: Your Domain) and entering the domain (or subdomain) that want to redirect to. In my case, I am using blog.bluedei.com.

You can also use a Missing files host by clicking on “Yes”. If you specify a missing files host, Blogger will look there if it cannot find a specified file on your regular domain. Learn more about missing files hosts.. Your missing files host must be a subdomain in the same domain as your blog. I don’t use this function at this time.

Per Google: “The most common use for this feature is when you have a number of images or other files stored on your own FTP server and then you move them to another server. Normally, this would break all the links to these files that are in your blog posts. However, if you use this feature then the broken links will all be redirected to the new location. (Assuming, of course, that the files all keep the same names and locations that they had on the original server.)

This situation may arise if you originally published your blog via FTP and then switched to using custom domain publishing. Images originally posted to your server do not get transferred over to Blogger when you do this, so you may want to move them all to a server such as images.yourdomain.com and use that as your missing files host.”

Now save your settings and that is it! You should now be able to key in your custom URL (mine is blog.bluedei.com) and it should pull up your existing Google blog. If this is all too confusing still, here is a search that pulls up blogger help pages about this.

It really is pretty easy and I was impressed with Google Blogger’s implementation.
Always move in a new direction!

~Susan Mellott

But before that, Christopher was kind enough to leave a comment on Part 1 explaining how to simulate multiple link list widgets in WordPress. I knew that there was only 1 link list widget (blogroll) in wordpress, but what I didn’t know was that if you give the links you add different categories, it will break the list down by that category so it functions as different groups of links. You can see this in action on this blog. I have a list of links called Blogroll and another list of links called Life. You cannot separate the lists, they appear one after the other, but you can get different groups of links. So if you were a company, you could have one group called “Our Locations” and another called “Our Distributors” (as examples). The heading of each group is based on the name you used for the category.

As Chris points out: Just go to the blogroll in the admin and select categories. Add a category for whatever topic you want like ‘books’ and add the new links to that category. They will show up as their own list. These instructions are actually for a wordpress.com hosted wordpress blog, but it is very similar if you have a self-hosted wordpress.org blog. Go to Admin—>Blogroll and add or edit a link. When you are on the page to set up the link, pick (or add) the category for the link from the list at the right and when you save it, it will show up with that category as the name of the list it is under. You can also do this if you have a wordpress.com blog, but only if you have already added the category previously. If not, you have to add the category through admin—>Blogroll—>Categories first. I don’t know why wordpress.com makes you do that extra step, but it does.

Anyway… On to sub-pages!

A sub-page is a page that has another page as its parent other than the main page. This is used to relate a set of pages to a particular page other than your main blog. As an example, you can see how I have set up an “Our Travel” page that appears in the list at the top of my blog. All pages that are sub-pages of other pages do not appear in the main heading of the blog. That lets my “Our Travel” be a completely different section of my blog and is similar to a website. In fact, this lets you almost use your blog as a website with more information than just your blog. You can keep lots more on your blog than just posts.

In Google Blogger, you cannot create pages, so obviously, you can’t create sub-pages either. But there are still things you can do to simulate sub-pages and/or use your blog for more than just a blog. One thing you can do is to create a back-dated post (see Part 1) as say, your “Locations” page that you put in your “Pages” link list in your sidebar. Then you can create several more posts with your different locations and then add links in the text of that post to each of your locations posts. You can get an idea of that by looking at my “Our Travel” page. I have added links on it to my sub-pages for 1996 and 1997. And on my 1996 sub-page, I added links to additional sub-pages for each of our travels in 1996. You can do the same thing in Blogger, by just substituting back-dated posts for sub-pages.

Another thing you could do is create a link list called “Locations” and then add links to each of the back-dated posts you have created for each location. Then you could add another link list for say, “Distributors” and add links to a post about each distributor (or a link to their site). Anyway, you get the idea. Pretty much the only thing you don’t get is the list of pages across the top of your blog like you do in WordPress.

On to WordPress: In WordPress, you can create actual sub-pages that are attached to a page and that won’t show up in the tabs across the top of your blog (only pages that have the main page as a parent show up on the top). What this means is that you have to have a “Pages” widget in your sidebar in order to access these sub-pages (unless you link to them from within the text of your page, which I have also done in my Our Travels pages).

In most WordPress themes (both wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress), in the pages widget, it will show all your pages, with the sub-pages indented below each page they belong to. Unfortunately, this particular theme Prosumer 1.4 that I am using does not do that. All pages show at the same level in my Pages list. That really isn’t very nice and it is much nicer when they are appropriately indented. Hopefully they will fix it at some point. If you go to my All Things Web 2.0 wordpress.com blog, you can see how it looks indented. And here is a clip of the Pages sidebar widget from my wordpress.com blog.

Doesn’t that look a lot nicer than the one in this theme? I do like this theme though so I put up with some idiosyncrasies.

And for self-hosted WordPress blogs, there are several plugins that you can use in place of your standard “Pages” widget. It is a little tricky to install a plugin on your self-hosted blog because you have to get the widget files from their site and then upload it to your own site where your blog is. If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with doing that, you can just use the regular “Pages” widget.

My favorite is the Flexi Pages widget by Srini G. It has several option for displaying that the regular Pages widget doesn’t have.

You can name the list whatever you want. And have a lot of different sort options such as by Page Title, Menu Order, Date Created, etc. You can also pick certain pages that you don’t want to show up in the list. You can have an entry on your page list to the home page (main blog) and call it whatever you like. The rest is pretty self-explanatory (except that the theme I’m using doesn’t indent the pages regardless of whether or not it is chosen).

The custom depth level means how many sub-pages of sub-pages down you want to show. Blank means all of them. You can see that I have entered -3. That is a little trick that is not really explained or mentioned that I found buried in the widget information. You can see how it works by clicking on my Flexipage widget to go to other pages. Here is what it does (from the info):

“Have the child pages, parent pages, sibling pages and top level pages displayed on a page while still leaving out the siblings of parent pages. This is not possible with older versions. Version 1.2 doesn’t include this as an ‘option’ though. You have to specify the ‘Custom depth’ as -3 to achieve this.”

Another Pages widget is the MultiPages Widget by Jerome LeCoq. It is more difficult to use because you have to know the ID of each page (which you can find by going to Admin–>Manage–>Pages and the ID is the number on the left of the title. It doesn’t really give you any extras over the flexipage widget either, except that you can have up to 9 of the multipage widgets. So unless you need more than 1 page list, the FlexiPage widget is the best and easiest of these two. Here is what the setup looks like for the MultiPage plugin:

And if you look at the very bottom of the Admin–>Presentation–>Widgets page, that is where you choose how many instances of the widget you want. NOTE: This is also where you choose how many of various other widgets you want also. I always forget where it is when I need to increase the number of a widget, like if I need more text widgets.

You can see how these different widgets/plugins work by looking at my left sidebar of my blog.

So try out some pages and increase the power of your blog!

~Susan Mellott

If you add them to your blog, they get mixed in with everything else. If you try to add them to your sidebar, you don’t really have much room or many options. This way, you can have a list at the top of your blog and on your sidebar with “Events”, “Location”, “Schedule”, “About Us”, “Help”, etc. (NOTE: Blogger doesn’t support adding pages, but there are ways to simulate pages that I explain below).

WORDPRESS: The first page you might add to your blog and the most common, is the “About Me” page. I cannot remember now, but I think that wordpress might already have one added for you, although you need to go edit it to add your information. See instructions below for editing or adding a page.

To add a new page, such as “Books I am reading”, you would go to your wp-admin (dashboard) and choose “Manage” and then “Pages”. You will see a list of all the pages you have so far and here you can view, edit or delete them. You could choose to edit your “About Me” page to add content, or to change the title or whatever you would like to do. It is just like creating or editing a post.

Or you can choose “Create new Page” which will take you to a page that looks like the page you get when you want to write a new post. You can give the new page a title (such as “Books I am Reading”) and can write whatever you want to appear on that page. NOTE: You can also go to Write—->Pages to create a new page.

When you publish it, you will see at the top of your blog, a new tab that says “Books I am Reading”. If you click on that tab, you will see your new page. Each theme is a little different but pretty much all of them do this.

You can also add a widget to your sidebar that lists your pages. If you go to Presentation—->Widgets, you can drag and drop the Pages widget into your sidebar and it will give you a list of your pages in your sidebar.

NOTE: If you are using the default sidebar(s) with your blog, dropping a new widget on it will make your default sidebar go away so you will have to set it up yourself by dragging and dropping the widgets on it that you had before. This lets you customize your sidebars pretty easily, but if you don’t want to mess with it yet, don’t add the widget. Your pages will appear at the top of your theme anyway.

Check it out on this blog. You can see the pages listed across the top of my blog and the list of pages in the left sidebar of my blog. You can also see that there are more pages listed in the sidebar than at the top. That is because these are sub-pages that are under “Our Travels”. You can see how they are indented under their main page. In Part 2 of this article I will explain sub-pages and how to add them.

Another way to add pages that are not on your blog is to make a list of links under your Blogroll to those pages. This is one place where I don’t understand WordPress. They don’t have a links widget where you can just add a list of links and name it “ACPL Branches” or “Other Library Sites” or whatever. You have the blogroll and that is it. You can, however, make a new page and call it Information or ACPL Branches, etc. and add the links there.

GOOGLE BLOGGER: Google Blogger doesn’t allow multiple pages, which really surprises me. I really did not realize that until I started writing about this. If you really want to have multiple pages (and especially sub-pages, which I will cover in my Part 2 of this article), you may want to consider moving to WordPress.

Each blog engine has its advantages and disadvantages (see my 3-part review of blog engines) but if this is really important and this workaround doesn’t suit your needs, moving to WordPress.com is an option. The nice thing about going from Blogger to WordPress.com is that WordPress.com has a nice Import feature that lets you easily move all your Blogger posts into your new WordPress blog. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn’t have that for moving from WordPress, although there are tools to let you do it.

Anyway, here is something you can do in Blogger to create ‘Pages’.

Go to Settings—->Archiving—–>Enable post pages—–>Yes—>Save. Then just create a post to create a new page. You can call it whatever you want. Backdate it so that it does not appear on the Main page. It will still be in your blog, but as the first post if you backdate it far enough. See the picture for where you change the date. It is in the lower right hand corner. The picture is a picture of the page post being created. Click on the picture to see it full-sized.

Now you need to get the permanent link for this post. If you go to Posting—->Edit Posts and select “Oldest” on the top right of the list of posts, you will see your new post as the first (oldest) post in your list. Click on View for that post and it will take you to the post. Now copy the URL (link) to that post (in the text box at the top of your browser). You will use it to paste into the page element you create below as the link to your ‘page’.

Now go to Template—->Page Element and add a Link List element to your sidebar. You can call it something like “Pages” and for the link, add the URL to the post you just created and name it whatever you want, like “About Me”. As you add page posts and links, you will get a list that looks similar to a Pages sidebar widget in WordPress (although it will not list each page across the top like WordPress).

One thing you will note if you use the Archives page element in your sidebar, is that it will show up there. I added my Google Blogger “About Me” post by just changing the year to 2001 instead of 2007. You will see in my archives list that I have 2001/November listed with my About Me post. If you pick some date for all your new ‘pages’ (like 1/1/2000), they will just all fall under that which is best. If you pick random dates then you will have a whole bunch of different dates show up in your Archive list.

If you look at my Google Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0, you can see this in action. The first ‘page’ on my list is actually a blog post. The second ‘page’ on my page list is a link to a page on this (my WordPress) blog. That is another way to add pages. As an example, if you have a blog and a website, you can link to information on a page on the website. If you already have an events or location or about page or home page you can link to it from your blog under your Pages list (or whatever you choose to call it, maybe Information or whatever makes sense).

In Part 2 of this article I will explain sub-pages and how to add and use them.

~Susan Mellott

After corresponding with Aaron from Techrigy and getting good and thorough answers from him, I feel a lot better about BlogBackupOnline. At the end of this post you will find the answers I received from Aaron regarding each item I noted in my previous post.

It is currently beta and acts like a beta release, in other words, it is quirky and has some bugs. But it is definitely far enough along to see that it is going to be very nice and that they are putting a lot of thought and effort into making it a good and stable product.

I got a little worked up mainly because it seemed that people and tech reviews were treating it like a finished product and when I tested it, it clearly was still in beta testing and was not as good (at this point) as they were leading people to believe.

But I am going to recommend that you take a look at it and see what it has and will do. It has some amazing features and is a very ambitious project, especially for being offered for free. Remember that it is still beta, but go get a feel for it and remember it because I think it will set the standard in blog backup sites before very long. I certainly look forward to when it out of beta and will definitely review it again then.

And Aaron very thoroughly addressed everything I had written in my email to Techrigy. I had said that I felt I received a ‘form letter’ reply, but after the weekend, Aaron wrote me a very good email addressing everything I’d found. So I will leave you with a copy of what he wrote so you can read the answers for yourself.

~Susan Mellott

Email Response from Aaron of Techrigy:

I’ve just done some regression tests and put out a patch. I’ll try to address everything you’ve brought up. The patch fixed a few problems:

1 The restoration process was incorrectly counting how many posts it had restored (effectively doubling it) which is why it was only restoring about 27 posts. It’s been fixed so it should properly restore 50 posts now.

2 When the restoration job stops after 50 posts, it was not properly writing a message into the log. I added a warning to the job log when someone attempts to restore more than 50 posts to blogger – “You attempting to restore more than 50 posts to Blogger. Only the first 50 posts will be restored. Successfully restored 50 blog posts.”

3 I added an informational message to the Restoration Wizard: “IMPORTANT NOTE ON RESTORING TO BLOGGER!!! In order to reduce splogs, Blogger will only allow 50 posts per day to be restored. If you are attempting to restore more than 50 posts to Blogger, you will have to use this Restore wizard to restore 50 posts per day until all post have been transfered.”

4 One the Content tab, I moved the pagination to the top of the grid. A handful of people have told me they can not get to the pagination control at the bottom of the screen – I’ve tried every combination of browsers (IE6,IE7, FireFox, Safari, Opera) and operating systems and haven’t been able to recreate it, so I haven’t been able to fix it. Hopefully moving pagination to the grid header will alleviate the problem. Any insight into the browser or configuration you are using that might be causing the problem?

NOTE by me: no idea why the bottom pagination was problematic, but it works just fine now at the top of the list.

5 Removed references to “changed blog posts”. When we read an entry, the white space often changes. For instance, if we read it through the feed versus when we screen scrape, we get some small changes to the content in the white space. We maintain a full history of changes so all versions are maintained so that not copies are ever lost, but these white space issues can confuse people, so I’ve simply taken the reference to them in the job messages out.

Bugs that still need to be addressed:

1 In reference to duplicate entries backup up with http://alongthepathto20.blogspot.com/. If you are using Feedburner combined with Blogger, the backup we collect has duplicate entries. Recently after acquiring Feedburner, Blogger started integrating Feedburner which has caused these hiccups. This problem occurs because we read an entry by screen scraping and get one permalink to the entry, then when we read the feed through feedburner, it’s has a different permalink (your feedburner entries go back through August 3rd which is why the duplicates go back to that date and stop). I’m working on a fix, but it’s not straight forward. To avoid the problem, you can disable the feedburner temporarily, but that not adequate -we’ll have to build a solution as time permits. For now you have duplicate entries – better to have 2 copies than to potential miss some content.

2 Restoring in chronoligical order. Right now it pulls the posts and just restore them in the order they are in the database which is arbitrary. If it restores everything, no problem – they are restored in arbitrary order but doesn’t really matter since they are assigned the appropriate post dates. If you select the entries to restore, no problem – again restored in arbitrary order but it gets to all of them. But when it gets to 50 and stops, its just taken the first 50 it pulled out of the database. Harmless but confusing.

I’ll try to answer your questions as well:

1 it shows how many posts and comments but not how many pictures (and actually, somewhere along the line, it quit reporting comments).

ANSWER – I’ve put this as a feature request to show how many pictures it’s backed up. If it doesn’t report comments or blogs found, that should mean it found zero. I’ll put a feature request as well to change this, since I can see how it would be confusing.

2 It says it is free for now while in beta, but approx how much will it cost in the future? I could not find a price on any ofthe products you offer, they all said to contact sales which makes me think it must be expensive

ANSWER – We are hoping to offer BlogBackupOnline for free as long as possible. I don’t foresee charging for it anytime soon. It is actually quite expensive to maintain for us, $698 per month hosting cost because it requires raid drives, tape backups, redundant network connections, class A hosting space, etc… in order to ensure the content is truly protected. If we did need to charge, we would likely charge $5-$10 per month. We also develop business products that have nothing to do with BlogBackupOnline. If those are successful, BlogBackupOnline should remain free indefinitely. Of course, many of the features you are request are slow to be implemented because we don’t charge for it which is a good point for offering a paid version.

3 it would be nice to be able to restore from and to a certain date, especially with the 50 post limitation in Blogger (and possibly in other blog engines)

ANSWER – great feature request. I’ll see if I can implement something like that.

4 it didn’t restore my tags/labels and I wonder if it would have if I was going blogger to blogger or any of the same type. (the answer was no after I tried it)

ANSWER – right now it doesn’t restore tags/labels (even from blogger to blogger). That’s been on the feature enhancement list for a while, so I hope to get to that soon.

5 my social networking and bookmarks icons on bottom of each post copied over and works, but points to my original blog. I can understand why, but it does still create a problem.

ANSWER – yes, I agree this is not ideal. I’ll look at various enhancements to replace links to the old website with links to the new website. Probable won’t happen quickly given the complexity.

6 when I click on content for my blog, I only see the last 10 posts and there is no way to scroll down through my earlier posts.

ANSWER – Your not the first person to encounter this problem. I made an adjustment to the pagination control. I hope that helps.

7 it is confusing on the restore screen when it shows nothing in the box on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen. It seems like there is nothing to restore. I figured out that I needed to ‘load blog entries’ but it would be much less confusing if they loaded when I entered that screen.

ANSWER – Yes, I can understand the confusion. If you have a page with many entries, loading when the page opens can be a major head ache, which is why it doesn’t load upon opening the screen. I’ll take another look and determine a better/clearer way to handle.

8 on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen, it would be useful if there is a limit on a blog engine as to how many posts can be restored each day, to state that on the page and to give an error if more than that number of posts were selected.

ANSWER – Great suggestions. I’ll put this on the short list – shouldn’t be to complicated to add but I couldn’t get to this weekend.

9 the restore screen says NOTE: The major blog platforms do not support restoring comments. The comments we have backed up will be added to the end of the post’s text. But WordPress imports posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file and posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog and posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog

ANSWER – Yes, WordPress can import those. We are limited to using the APIs like Metaweblogs which doesn’t expose these capabilities. I’ll look at other features time permitting, but I’m afraid without major rework its still quite difficult. Perhaps WordPress 2.3 (just released) has some capabilities built into the API these days.

10 the export tab lets me export my backup to a file on my hard drive. But what can I do with this file when I have it if I want to restore from it? will WordPress import it?

ANSWER – The export file is not designed to be imported into WordPress directly. Its XML, so anyone could write an XSLT to convert it into whatever format they needed. For now, its simply a backup copy for your own piece of mind. Worst case scenario you will always have the content that can be imported if need be. We are working on an import.

11 and if so, why not the comments as comments?

ANSWER – good suggestion. We should write comments as their own nodes. But we just havent gotten around to it yet.

12 Since there is no name/password required to backup a blog, I believe you could essentially backup almost anyone’s blog (or certain posts) and restore them to your own blog. (I think you could do this with other backup tools also since they use the public RSS feeds)

ANSWER – Yes, absolutely. BlogBackupOnline is like a copier machine. I could take a Picasso down to Kinko’s and copy it and put it on my wall at home -but it doesn’t make it a Picasso We discourage this and respond promptly to any DCMA notices – but technically we can’t prevent it. It hasn’t been a problem so far and we hope it won’t.

I hope this helps. Since you’ve beat me up pretty good in public, I’ll take it you don’t like the product even as a free public service. That’s your right. But honestly, BlogBackupOnline is by far the most full feature, documented blog backup system out there. It require no software and even gives you the storage for free, and works with more platforms than any other solutions. It backs up the blog posts, the comment, and the images linked to from you blog. It’s automated to run daily backups – you set it up and forget it until you need it. All for free.

Yes, you encountered some bugs with restoring which is my fault – Iapologize and hope we corrected it. And I realize some of the content you backed up was very confusing because it got duplicate entries. I’ll keep trying to make it more logical and polished. But I’ll stressed, every blog you enter was (and continues to be with no effort by you) 100% backed up. All your content is safe from loss at this point. Restoration is not perfect, but it works the best it can given the limitations of Blogger. Again it was very confusing in your situation, and I’m sorry for that again.

One involved using a WordPress blog to backup it up to since WordPress will import almost everything (posts, comments, pictures) from many blog engines and export posts/comments to a file. That will only give you a full restore though, you can’t selectively restore posts. Another was to download a free program called Blogger Backup on CodePlex that gives you a basic backup of your posts and will allow you to backup and restore your posts, both to your original Blogger blog or to a new Blogger blog (but not your comments, pictures or categories)

But in looking around and reading other posts, I thought I had found an even better way to backup your Google Blogger Blog (or any other blog). PC World named it as one of the 25 Web Sites to Watch and several blog posts were written favorably about it such as this post from WebWare or this post from Download Squad.

What it is is an online site called BlogBackupOnline that allows you backup a variety of blog types and you can set it to do a full backup the first time and then daily backups. It also backs up images such as various picture formats that you have on that site and they plan to add support for videos as well. It also backs up and restores comments, although it puts the comments on the end of each post they belong to as part of the post. Still, that is better than Blogger Backup at this point. You can do a full restore or you can choose posts to restore.

BlogBackupOnline supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Friendster, LiveJournal, Serendipity, Windows Live Space, Movable Type, Terapad, and Vox. And they will be adding support for more platforms soon. NOTE: I guess they mean to run a backup against since it only gives Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal or Windows Live Spaces as options to restore to.

You get 50meg of space free to backup your data. As an example of what that holds, I have backed up this blog up to this point using it and I had 80 posts, 41 comments and some number of images (they don’t report the number of images you have stored) and I used 989 kb which is approximately 1 meg.

It has a very good and complete help and here’s a link to small PDF file brochure for it. Everything about this program is very professional looking.

Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? That is what I thought and I tried it and was impressed with how easy it was and how nicely it was done. That is, until I really started looked at what happened with my backups and restores. Because they didn’t work right and that is really what it is all about, regardless of what bells and whistles something does or doesn’t have.

My backups and restores were so wonky that I thought I must have done something wrong. So I re-tried it, backing up a different blog and restoring it to a different blog engine and it still was all messed up. I honestly can’t figure out why it is so messed up. I keep wanting to blame myself because surely it can’t be that flakey. But even if I did something that caused it to flake out, I was being very careful and if it is that touchy (and on more than 1 occasion) then you still certainly can’t count on it.

Here’s what happened. The first time, I did a full backup on my WordPress blog clear.bluedei.com which had (according to blogbackuponline) 80 posts and 41 comments. Then I restored it in full to a Blogger blog (blog.bluedei.com). It restored only about 27 of my posts. The restored posts seemed random too, some from Sept, some from August and some from July.

I had used another blogger backup program and it said that there was a Blogger limit of 50 posts per day that could be put on blogger so I was wondering what BlogBackupOnline would do. I was surprised that it reported that my restore was successful and that nowhere did it say that not all my posts were restored, not even in the log which said ‘finished with no error’. And I thought that at least I would have 50 posts restored and was surprised at only 27ish and random at that. I didn’t even realize I didn’t get a full restore until I really looked, since it appeared to have backed up everything OK.

I wrote to the Techrigy support about this (and several other comments that I’ve posted at the end of this blog) and did not get much of a response (“Sorry you experienced these problems. We are looking at the issues and will let you when we figure out what caused the problems you encountered. Thanks for trying out BlogBackupOnline”). I had written a pretty detailed email and to be honest, this just sounded like a generic response that didn’t lead me to believe they had even read my email. Maybe I’m cynical, but that’s what I thought.

I thought I would try it again and backup my Along the Path to 2.0 Blogger blog and then restore it to my blog.bluedei.com Blogger blog and my testxx.wordpress.com WordPress blog. I set up the testxx blog to use for testing this specifically and the blog.cleardei.com blog was used for testing the different blog engines in the post series I wrote.

I ran a full backup of Alongthepathto20 and it reported 84 blog entries (with 1 changed, not sure what that meant) and cut off before it said the number of comments (or maybe was saying there were none). Now this was more blog entries than I had so that seemed suspicious right off the bat. Then it shows that it ran another full backup right after this one (although I only ran 1) and all it said was the number of changed entries was 4 (whatever that meant, I wasn’t changing anything on that blog). Both reported they finished with no errors.

Then I went to the content page for this blog (you can see about the latest 10 posts it backed up) and there were duplicates for each post I could see. So I restored the full backup to my blogger blog.bluedei.com and my wordpress testxx.wordpress.com. Both reported Finished with No Error. They had no posts before I ran the restore. You can see the results of each restore and compare it to the originally backed up alongthepathto20.blogspot.com by looking at each blog.

As you can see, the blogger blog only restored a random part of the posts (and actually about 27 again). The wordpress blog restored everything it backed up (all 84) and the posts were duplicated back to the August 3rd post (literary insults) and then the posts appeared OK (just one of each).

So what in the heck is it doing? And would you trust this to backup and restore your data? It confused me so much that I was tempted to run another test to see if I could figure out what was going on. But I’ve spent hours on this already and really don’t have the time to keep repeating the tests. Especially since I don’t get paid to do it!

And I didn’t even do any testing of the daily backups that it runs after you’ve run a full backup.

These are some other comments I had written to techrigy about the product when I first looked at it. I could add more to the list now but I won’t. I’ve spent too much time on this already.

1. it shows how many posts and comments but not how many pictures (and actually, somewhere along the line, it quit reporting comments).
2. it says it is free for now while in beta, but approx how muchwill it cost in the future? I could not find a price on any ofthe products you offer, they all said to contact sales which makes me think it must be expensive
3. it would be nice to be able to restore from and to a certain date, especially with the 50 post limitation in Blogger (and possibly in other blog engines)
4. it didn’t restore my tags/labels and I wonder if it would have if I was going blogger to blogger or any of the same type. (the answer was no after I tried it)
5. my social networking and bookmarks icons on bottom of each post copied over and works, but points to my original blog. I can understand why, but it does still create a problem.
6. when I click on content for my blog, I only see the last 10
   posts and there is no way to scroll down through my earlier
   posts.
7. it is confusing on the restore screen when it shows nothing in the box on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen. It seems like there is nothing to restore. I figured out that Ineeded to ‘load blog entries’ but it would be much less confusing if they loaded when I entered that screen.
8. on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen, it would be useful if there is a limit on a blog engine as to how many posts can be restored each day, to state that on the page and to give an error if more than that number of posts were selected.
9. the restore screen says NOTE: The major blog platforms do not support restoring comments. The comments we have backed up will be added to the end of the post’s text. But WordPress imports posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file and posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog and posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog
10. the export tab lets me export my backup to a file on my hard drive. But what can I do with this file when I have it if I want to restore from it? will WordPress import it? and if so, why not the comments as comments?
11. Since there is no name/password required to backup a blog, I believe you could essentially backup almost anyone’s blog (or certain posts) and restore them to your own blog. (I think you could do this with other backup tools also since they use the public RSS feeds)

There you have it. That was the results of my basic testing of this product. You decide if you’d want to trust your backups and restores to it. I can definitely say that based on my testing, I wouldn’t.

UPDATE 10/4/2007: I have since gotten a very good and thorough reply from Techrigy and I feel that their product will be very good when finished. I was more upset about people writing as though their product was fully functional now, than about the quality of their product when finished. For their responses to all my questions and concerns, see this post update of mine dated 10/04/2007.

~Susan Mellott