In the beginning there was blog

Back in Feb of 2005 those words started it all. From that moment on our blog began to grow, and morph into what it is today. Sure there have been down times, but all in all looking back the technology has greatly improved, as have my blogging skills. Tonight i began to reflect on my blogging career. i realized that there is alot of good info in this blog. I have written about births, deaths, moves, jobs, crazy events and everything else in between. So i began to wonder... how do i back all of this up in case google looses it. I have already lost part of it and never knew it. back in the day, before google owned blogger. There was no easy method to upload pictures. I had no server running headys.us. so i was left to what ever webspace i had available which was our space at BenLomand. Well tonight as i began to prowl i realized at some point that space has been taken away from me. Therefore, my early posts have the text but no pictures. So my quest for backup began. Casual readers may want to stop here, those interested in the methods found might want to continue.

The task itself sounds easy. Back up my blog. Its free, its easy. how hard can it be. Well it seems more difficult that I first thought. When you think about it, our blogs are comprised of templates, text, pics, java aps for flickr, cluster maps, surveys, flash movies, etc etc. Blogger just puts it all together in a cute easy to use package for us. It appears that pre-google. There were some software options for backup. Most options now start like this. Go get PHD, when finished write a program in machine language. Prepare blog for probing, then enjoy your backup. Well i have neither the time nor the stomach for any of those things so i sought out after anything that would give me a quick, even dirty copy of my blog for historic purposes. Showing my lazyness i went with the following method in hopes that Google will one day give us an easy "export" feature. Until that day i found an interesting url you can use to query your blog. It has some criteria that you can modify such as start date, end date, and max number of entries. I just put these really high and hit enter. the result is our blog as you would normally see it, only with every post in one really long screen. At this point i used the "save as" feature of my browser. Being the nerd i am, i used two different browsers just in case ha ha. I realized this isn't ideal but for now it will at least let me sleep at night. If your interested in this url here it is. Just copy it, take out the (remove this space) i had to do to get it in here, sorry. and put in your blog name.

http://theheadys.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=
(remove this space)
1999-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&
(remove this space)
updated-max=%202010-01-01%20T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=999