Housekeeping note: archive complete, but for how long?

I think that I have now completed the installation of my old Vox blog (a.k.a. my book review archive) onto this blog, now that Vox has closed its doors and will indeed be disappearing from Thursday. 

My book review archive is now here. You can get to it by clicking on the appropriate link at the top of this blog (just under the header) or at the sidebar. 

What took the time was not exporting the blog itself but re-categorising all the posts. I've now completed this task so you can read book reviews by region (country or continent), genre, and other categories of interest, such as whether the book is translated, or won an award.  You can receive any of these as an RSS feed by clicking on the icon on the top of the category archive you have chosen. A full archive of all my reviews, by date and category, is here.

While slogging through this work, I learned that Six Apart, the company that makes Typepad (this blog platform) and Vox (the defunct one) has been acquired by SAY media. Although the old and new owners assure Typepad bloggers that the service will continue (I hope it does as we pay for it), the emphasis of the new company will be on monetisation, that is, people who want to put ads on their blogs in the hope of making money out of them. As this isn't my cup of tea, I am now seriously considering a back-up blog on Blogger (I have a couple of old blogs there that I could revive). There are only so many back-up archives one can have, though, and retain a modicum of sanity.

Comments

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Yikes! This sounds like a huge amount of work. I appreciate it as someone who does look up archived reviews, especially when you were doing posts by country with linked reviews, which I followed. Now I'll check reviews by year. Also, I just saw the lists of linked blogs and know what I'll be doing in the wee hours for awhile. Thanks so much for your work on this.

[Maxine]

Thanks, Kathy, hope you find it useful. I enjoy this, really ;-)

[Kerrie]

What about exporting to posterous Maxine? I did that earlier this year with my work blog: http://smik.posterous.com/ You don't have a lot of control over how it looks but it is all there

[Bernadette]

I don't have a backup of any sort for my blog (though most reviews are on good reads I suppose). I keep meaning to but....If the people at work knew this I'd get skinned alive given that one of my responsibilities is nagging people to make sure they follow all the backup procedures I badgered them into implementing.

Must resolve to try harder in private life :)

[Maxine]

Thanks, Kerrie, I will check that out. Exporting a blog is no problem, it is the metadata that tend to get lost in translation and I value them...

Bernadette - by posting your reviews on GoodReads you are backing up a large chunk of your blog I guess. I do occasionally create an exported file of Petrona and save it on my hard drive but probably not as often as I should! It is very easy to do though, via the blog dashboard settings.

[Maxine]

So I signed up to Posterous and exported my blog - it took a while, and said it had done 1040 posts. When I went to look, it was the same post (this one) 1040 times ;-) I've deleted it (the Posterous blog) now.

[Bernadette]

LOL - well this is a good post but not sure it warrants that many copies

I am playing with http://blogbackupr.com/ - seems to take a while (24+ hours for a full backup) but looks promising.

[Maxine]

Thanks, Bernadette, am giving it a try. As you say, slow but promising (I think only a text back up, not sure yet)...and reassuring. I tried an export to Blogger as a back-up but Blogger only seems to like you exporting another Blogger blog into one of its blogs.