Backing up Blogger Blog

I recently read about disappearing blogs in blogger so I searched for tools to backup my blogs. I found the following tools to backup to your local hard disk:

1. Blogger Backup
2. Web Grabber (for OS X)
3. HTTrack Website Copier

There is also a free service I found:

Blog BackupR

Sitemaps for Blogspot sites

There are two systems in blogspot, the old one and the new one (was previously beta).  To verify, you need to visit to see if you get a XML or a web page.

In the list below, the first three url is the default for sitemap but in the new system, it is redirected to feedburner and will not be recognized by rss readers.  If that is the case then use the last url for the feed.  If it still provide the xml format then you can still continue to use those urls.

Old sitemaps:
http://programmersjournal.blogspot.com/rss.xml
http://programmersjournal.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://programmersjournal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

New sitemap.

http://programmersjournal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

Review Google Chrome Browser

I realize that there are many reviews of Chrome already but I am approaching this as a programmer blogger.

Things I like about Chrome:

• It is fast.
• In some cases where I get timeout with either IE or Firefox, the page still gets rendered in Chrome.
  
• The incognito page is often handy when you want to do research and don't want to leave any trail on the PC of where you have been.
• You can open a set of book marks in a new window (similar functionality available in firefox).
  

Things I don't like about Chrome:

• When you perform compose in Blogger, it encloses the subsequent paragraph between <div> </div> tag. Both IE and Firefox does not add these extra tags.
• It does not have an option to undo close tab which you may have accidentally closed (this is available in FireFox - haven't noticed it in IE7 - not sure if it is there or not).
  
• If you want to have properly aligned table, you can enter your information into Excel and then paste in into the compose screen in Firefox and the data will align correctly. See examples below.
• Assuming you have your photos in Flickr, you can switch to view source and search for <img src="http://farm When you do that in Firefox, it will highlight and select the text for you. In Chrome, the text is selected but not highlighted. (I do this because I upload my images to flickr and then display them in my blogs).
  

Pasting from Excel into Blogger compose screen:

This is how the excel looks like:


Using Firefox:

Date	Mileage	time
1-Jan-08	10	1 hr
2-Jan-08	5	0.5 hr

Using IE:

Date
Mileage
time
1-Jan-08
10
1 hr
2-Jan-08
5
0.5 hr

Using Chrome:

Date Mileage time 1-Jan-08 10 1 hr 2-Jan-08 5 0.5 hr

Creating properly aligned content in Blogger

The easiest way to create a properly aligned information in Blogger is:

1. Open excel and place the data in table as shown below.
2. Copy and then paste into the compose screen (this only works if you are using FireFox) and there you have it, your data is aligned correct (as shown below).
   

This is how the excel looks like:


Using Firefox:

Date	Mileage	time
1-Jan-08	10	1 hr
2-Jan-08	5	0.5 hr

Blog Utilities

When I first started this blog. The first thing I started to do was to find a good site to host the blog for free. There was a few available but I found blogger to be the one with the most lenient, which is why I chose it.

Then I started placing images but found that Google placed a 1 Gbyte limit. Then after discussing with colleagues of mine, I was told that there is a lot of things that can be done with the blog.

You can at chats into your blog using cbox, see the side of this blog. Then you can also keep track of your blog statistics using tools from this site. It is also nice to see where your visitors are coming from using tools from this site. Another site providing live feed of the traffic into your blog is here.

Finally, there are a lot of widgets you can add to your blog, which has been collected here.