I didn’t realize this until the other day, but it’s possible to back up every post you’ve ever made using an offline client, such as the excellent ecto. I use the Mac version of this great program, and to back up every post I’ve ever made is as simple as:
- Find out how many posts you have made.
- Tell ecto to download this many recent posts.
- Press the Refresh button.
The first one is easy: when you first log into your Blogsome blog, you’ll see on the dashboard a panel like:
Blog Stats
There are currently 393 posts and 284 comments, contained within 19 categories.
Getting this info to your offline composer might be difficult - each one has different settings. In ecto, choose the Account in the main window (Entries & Drafts), and then go to the ecto➞Preferences… menu [keyboard shortcut: ⌘, ]. In the window that appears, choose the Recent Entries tab.
I use the following settings: Store copies of published entries locally, uncheck Retrieve titles and summaries only, and insert the desired number of entries to retrieve.
Then, click Save, and press Refresh in the main view. It might take some time if you have a lot of entries, but it’s nice to know you have a backup.
Oh, and if you do regular backups, you can set the value to a reasonable value, like 10 or 20, and make sure you do it every now and then before you’ve posted that many new posts. If you make any edits to old posts, they’ll only get picked up in a large backup like this one, though.
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If you are using another client, the instructions will be similar, but you may have to search around for a while before you find where to change the number of entries to retrieve. Good luck: happy backup.
First of all, compliments for your site. It’s really light and original.
Since I carefully read the TOS, I realize that Blogsome could throw away all of my blog at any time: this would be orrible after many hours spent in searching informations and writing.
So I will use ecto. But I want to know if the backup can be turned into another wordpress blog on another platform or into any other kind of blog.
1 month, 1 week after the fact.
Absoloutly! That\’s what ecto is for.
You can even use AppleScript to automate transfer, if you are on a Mac. If not, there may be a simple way, other than just re-posting each item.
Maybe this will be an item for a future post!
1 month, 1 week after the fact.
To answer your first commenter, the terms of service are only to protect us against any disaster. We do not have any plans to upset users. We have been going for over a year and haven’t lost any users posts (that we know of).
Regards,
Roger
1 month, 2 weeks after the fact.
Hope this gets a reply… I don’t think the current version of ecto works with Blogsome, or else the backend has been modified not to work with it. I get an error which states: “Response from server does not contain valid XML.” An internet search revealed that the version of WordPress Blogsome uses may be in need of updating, something I obviously can’t do. Are there any alternatives?
4 months, 2 weeks after the fact.
I can guarantee it does work, at least with ecto for Mac.
You may need to make sure you have the settings correct: in the Accounts section, make sure MetaWebLog is chosen.
4 months, 2 weeks after the fact.
Shoot, it was an elementary error on my part (that took me 2 hours to figure out). I was putting the wrong URL for the admin API. *smack*
Now, if only ecto could retrieve all my posts, instead of a random scattering of about ten of them.
4 months, 2 weeks after the fact.
Have you set it to download more posts than you have written? Not sure where to set this in the Win version, but under Mac it’s under Preferences…, Recent Entries.
4 months, 2 weeks after the fact.
Hey, sorry to bother you but I thought about backing up my blog recently too and the blogsome-forum lead me here.
I tried using ecto like you described but when I click the
»refresh«-button ecto says that the answer to»metaWeblog.getRecentPosts«could not be described or something and I should look up the Console where it says:»Sorry, the server is too busy to process your request right now.Please try again later.«
I tried this several times during the day (I have only 50 posts) and somehow I don’t believe that the server is THAT busy…
Mh,… anyway I would really be glad if you’d have any suggestions. Thanks!
1 year, 4 months after the fact.
Hmm, not sure. It’s possible that the XMLRPC interface doesn’t work properly again - I haven’t used ecto or any other client in ages. (Hardly spend any time on the Mac at all now).
I do know that I was having issues with uploading images via ecto some time ago - it could be related.
1 year, 4 months after the fact.
how i could export all of my post including comments from blogsome to wordpress?
2 years, 1 month after the fact.
You’ll want an SQL dump of your blog.
Ask the admin team. You can find The Uvular R in the forums, or rogerg.
You will also need some know-how about how to put this data into a new blog. If you are wanting to go to WordPress.com, then you might struggle. If it is a self-hosted blog, or a proper WordPress install, where you can actually execute SQL commands, then you’ll have better luck
I did this once, a long time ago. I had to massage the data somewhat - the table names were different. If you can’t, find a friendly local database guru to help you. I had about 6 or 7 goes before I got it right. I may have posted on this blog about it, but I don’t think I did.
2 years, 1 month after the fact.
Oh, and expect some issues with extended characters. You’ll notice on this post and the comments attached to it, the errors where extended characters are supposed to be. I can’t be arse fixing all of them. I did some find/replace work to fix a heap, but it was too much work for content that doesn’t get looked at too often.
2 years, 1 month after the fact.