Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Cool Tool to Export and Import Blogs

Blogger has a great tool to export/import blogs and I used it while moving my old blog here. At first I thought that I would need to cut and paste all of the old blog entries into this blog and then comments would be lost, not to mention it would take a long time. I decided to see if there was any tool available that could export the blog, so I went to Google and typed "export blog into new blog" and found an article stating Blogger has a site available for their users to beta test new Blogger features located at http://draft.blogger.com and one of the new beta features was exporting/importing blogs.

I visited the site which looks just like Blogger.com and signed in with my Blogger user name and password. After signing in, it looked the same but after looking around found a few changes from the regular Blogger. What's nice is any changes you make to your blog using the beta Blogger does display in your blog. I found the tool that allows you to export and import blogs and so I then signed into the beta Blogger site with my old blog credentials and used the tool to export my old blog. It basically creates an XML file that you can save to your computer (which is great because it allows you to keep this file which you can use as a backup for your blog). The XML file stores all blog entries you posted along with all comments received. It does not include widgets you may have used or the blog template you used to make your blog pretty.

I then signed back into the beta Blogger site with my new Chunks credentials and imported the file I saved to my computer and voila, all blog entries and comments displayed. What's REALLY nice about the import is that it imports all entries/comments to your blog but does not publish them automatically. I was so happy about that because I wanted to manually go through each blog entry and remove all references to my old blog along with all comments I had posted using my old blog user name. So I then went through each blog entry reading all posts and comments and removing what was needed. After doing this I published the post and then the old post displayed in my new blog. Beautiful! I was very happy that nothing was lost.

Since I started blogging I have never gone back and read any old posts. Have you ever read your old posts? It was quite enlightening to do so because it really made me realize that I am getting better. Sure, I still have dark days when depression wraps its cold hands around my throat, but really, it's not been as bad as it has been. I'm not slipping into suicidal thoughts as much and the heavy blanket of depression hasn't suffocated me for a while.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not sitting here thinking that I've beat depression and that it's gone for good. In the past I would feel that way and then be sorely disappointed when it came back to haunt me. I think I accept the fact that I have depression now and before I could never accept it. If you can't accept something it really creates conflict and I was troubled for a long time. I was also embarrassed that I had depression. I felt abnormal and hated the feeling. Now I realize depression is my reality and this new blog will now be about bits and pieces, or chunks, of my reality versus feeling like an abnormal soul.

I'm not abnormal. I'm me. And that is OK. What a great reality to awaken to!

 
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