I don't know how many people know this but Blogger offers you a way to email yourself a copy of your post. This is a cheap and simple way to backup your blog and with the way Blogger is going through and arbitrarily deleting blogs, this is just one more way to protect yourself. 1. Go to the control panel. 2. Click on Settings and then Email. 3. The first option BlogSend address, allows you to send yourself backup copies of your posts to a specified address. Get a Yahoo or even a Gmail account and enter the address here. Each time you post to your blog, Blogger will send you a copy of your post via email. 4. The next option Mail-To-Blogger-Address is where you will send blog post TO. In the space provided enter in a pin (either alphabetical or numerical). Write down the address. Checkmark the Publish option. 5. Click Save Settings and then republish your blog.
That is definitely a neat idea. I know WordPress also has an email-to-post option. I wonder how much of a difference there is between the two. I realize that there is a better way to transport a blogger blog to wordpress, but this may work if you've already lost your blogger account.
That's a good tip. A better one those is to move your blog to WordPress and do a monthly dump of your database. That way if you ever have to restore your blog it takes one upload and everything is back to how it was, including comments.
Very true, Yaro, but people are still infatuated with the freeness of Blogger and/or just don't want to move. Thanks for the tip though. If more people moved to their own domain, maybe Blogger would get the hint and clean up its act.
I think for some of the blogger blogs I've seen, I'd say the person running it has the IT knowledge of a tree stump. Start mentioning domain names, web hosting, FTP, DNS, etc and their eyes will just glaze over. For people like that, a service like blogger where you just type in a blog name, login information, choose options from menus, clicky-clicky, start blogging is a good service to offer. It'd be nice if alternatives to it were more widely available. Blogger just happens to have everyone's hearts and minds when it comes to "free weblogs". For those who know IT related stuff, hosting your own is mostly a breeze. For those who don't, it'd probably be a nightmare. And some people just believe their time is spent on better things than learning. To each.
for wordpress there is plugin that comes inbuilt which can take your daily backup and another plugin sends them daily or weekly the backup up email at the time you select.
I'm already on wordpress, but I don't know what Yaro means by a monthly database dump. Anyone care to explain to a complete newb?
I know if you're running your blog on a shared hosting account using cPanel, go into phpMyAdmin, select your database, select all tables and click export. I believe if you want to go with the standard choices that will work for a backup. Choose SQL, at the bottom select zipped and hit go. You will get a zip file with one sql script in it. If you need to recreate your database, go back into phpMyAdmin, tell it to import the .sql fine in that zip.
Sure no problem. Yes WordPress has a plugin that will allow you to do a backup on command. You can find it here. Actually there are a couple. You can find them at either the WordPress plugin page or the WP Plugin database. Tyrithe I think you hit it right on the nose in that most people are looking for something quick an easy. The only time they start looking around for something else is when things go bad. The problem is that while there are tons of other free hosts, Blogger is the most well known. Ah well, I suppose if everyone knew all there was about blogging, there wouldn't be a market for us in the tutorial biz.