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Monday, October 30, 2023

Spike's Hat/ Save the Blog?

Spike couldn't go on the field trip with the others yesterday:
bink had glued her whipped-cream hat on & the glue was still wet.
I was surprised Spike was so patient as to want to stay home and let it dry, but the girlettes are going to parade in the windows tomorrow--Halloween--and she wanted to be ready for that.
Which she is!

It will be an inside parade, in the windowsills, because it's going to be freezing cold. It might even snow (a little) tonight.

Snow is not unheard of for Halloween here--everyone old enough, like me, still talks about the Halloween blizzard of 1991--"one of the state's historical great blizzards", says the MN DNR:
"The storm total in the Twin Cities was 28.4 inches of snow, establishing a single-storm snowfall record."

I was helping a friend move Nov. 1, so I remember the blizzard extra well, me slogging with boxes through a little path shoveled to the truck, which I'm surprised could even get down the street.

Has anyone here printed or otherwise saved their blog?

Reading Frances Partridge's diaries from the 1950s, I've started to wonder about saving--printing?--some of my posts.
FP's paper journals were there when she wanted to publish them 20-some years after she wrote them, and remain stable now, 70 years later.

Doesn't look like parent company Google is going anywhere anytime soon or looking to shut down Blogger (though they do shut down their products); but I wonder:
will online writing still be accessible in a dozen or more years?

We know how fast tech can change. I remember being excited about electric typewriters! And I used to write for the publisher on floppy disks.

Not that I expect my blog to outlive me, I just want it to live as long as me.
I'd like to be able to look back at it should I live another twenty years, to 82--around my statistical life expectancy.

Twenty years? Eek.
A lot of my relatives lived into their late 80s––
that would only give me a few more years, but I'd take them--and some lived into their late 90s, though frankly illnesses made their last few years awfully hard.
And no years are guaranteed, of course.

But to print the whole blog?
That would be massive! Maybe I should/would like to start editing it, at least selecting favorite posts.


I have an index tag, "favorite posts". I've used it inconsistently though--you don't know a post is a favorite right away.
There are twenty-one posts with that tag. What even are they?
[goes and looks]

Okay, a lot of them are photos of favorite things I've made,
but I didn't even tag the girlettes recreating Manet's "Bundle of Asparagus", which makes me as pleased and proud as anything I've ever done. I've just added the tag.
(Gee, that was only one year ago.)

But the point of the blog isn't stand-out individual posts so much as the accumulation of average ones.

When the month turns over, often I'll go look at posts from that month in past years---just now looking at
November from eight years ago-- 2015. There's no one post from that month that stands out in particular, but I liked revisiting it--it was an interesting month, and I'd forgotten a lot of it!
For instance, this quote from Joyce Appleby's biography, Thomas Jefferson that I liked:

"Jefferson had in abundance what most people 
are lucky to have in small doses: imagination."

Lots of bad things were happening, and I was/people were already speaking of the world being at war.
I wrote:
Has anyone else named it World War III?
Pope Francis has. Last year, on September 13, 2014, he said,
"After the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction."

 Not that that's cheering, but it helps place me in time. "Oh, that's right, we've been here a while."

Yes, cheering: I was also meeting weekly with pals to Sew 'n' Snack & Chat--and this morning I hope to meet up with one of them for the first time since Covid for just that--a mending date at a coffee shop.


ABOVE, L to R: [bink's arm holding Pinky (bear)],
me, Esther, & Julia, 2015

7 comments:

  1. I periodically back up my blog by downloading an XML version (which is possible on the Blogger dashboard). That way if the blog gets erased or otherwise compromised I could upload it again, fresh. But I haven't printed it out or saved it in any other form. As you said, that would be MASSIVE. I figure I'll deal with that when the time comes! (I think it's unlikely Blogger would shut down so quickly there wouldn't be time.)

    It's also on the Wayback Machine, so even if Blogger disappeared tomorrow, there's a way to read older posts. Not sure all of it would be retrievable that way, though.

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  2. I have saved my blog ( my webmaster aka brother knows how!)
    But I must save and print each one as I go...One of those roundtoit jobs....

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  3. SiteSucker is a handy Mac app for downloading a blog (or any website). I use it once in a while to make a copy of everything. Elaine is making PDFs of choice posts, year by year. Google is instituting a policy of deactivating accounts that go unused for two years, so if you want your blog to stick around, you need to make some sort of arrangement for someone to log in.

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  4. “ Elaine is making PDFs of choice posts”: from her blog.

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  5. Interesting reading Michael Leddy's comment..I must check my blog reading/following list and weed out those that no longer exist.
    There are quite a few that no longer blog, but still comment....

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  6. THANKS, Steve, Michael, and GZ!
    Good to know some options!

    I have downloaded the xml file from Blogger settings, as Steve does- good for a backup but not human-readable.
    I will go the Elaine route next and select posts to save as PDFs---a gradual process.... (and like Elaine, from my own blog, yes :) ).

    Yeah, Google will send out warnings before they delete blogs, but ya never know what situation a blogger might be in--possibly not able to attend to it? Unwell, or who knows what?
    Things will not always be as they are today.
    Best to be prepared ahead of time, I figure--like making a will!

    I have set up a plan to pass my blog sign-in along when I die... or am incapacitated for more than Google's two years... it will be up to survivors to decide if they want to bother.

    THANKS AGAIN for commenting!

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  7. PS. Whoops—XML is readable—I hadn’t looked closely. But it’s text only

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