Thingamablog Blog

I Have Archived my Other Blog

I have successfully archived my 2009 blog and started the 2010 follow-on blog.

You can see the results here

I used the procedures that I outlined before but I found some issues that were not obvious to me before. The issues are:

The URL's to images in the blog are hardwired to the base directory when the image is included. I have not found a way to change this even when I republish the entire blog into its new archive folder. The images are uploaded into the new media folder, but they are not referenced there. They are referenced with a fully qualified URL to the base media folder.

To fix the problem, I just left the images in the base level media folder. It is not necessary to copy the images into the archived media folder, although the final upload of the archived blog to the new folder will put them there.

Another issue was the naming of the files that contain comments on my blog. They are named after the entry numbers, which repeat from 0 to n since I have restarted with a new blog. I have fixed that by running a copy of comments.php down in the archive folder, so it leaves and retrieves the comment files in that folder. The new blog uses the base folder, so there is no conflict even though the file names are repeated in the new blog.

Since the blog starts over each year, I have added a link to the archive folder for the previous year's blog in my favorite links section.

1. Create a new archive folder named after the previous year e.g. arch2009
2. Move the old blog files into the the new folder.
3. Copy the scripts, hitcounter, etc. into the new folder
4. Move the e_<n>.txt comment files into the new folder.
5. Change the blog settings to publish the old blog into the new folder
6. Republish the entire blog.
7. Create a new blog using the new year in the name.
8. Copy the template files into the new blog area.
9. Re-create the custom tags in the new blog.
10. Import scripts, images, etc. into the web folder for the new blog.
11. Edit the search file to include the new archive folder.
12. Publish the new blog at the top level

I had to change my search program a bit to fix some bugs in it that made it fail to find entries in the archive folder. Here is a newer version of the file.

nhat_search

I will document my comments code in a later post.

This has been a bit of trouble to implement, and it requires some handwork moving files around, but I think it will be worth it to avoid the always increasing upload times as the blog grows over the years.