Bill's Genealogy Blog

Bill Buchanan is a long-time genealogy enthusiast, living in Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada. This blog will describe my experiences as I research my family history and help others.

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Location: Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada

I am a retired online school teacher. I love family history. From 2007-2020, I spent much of my time providing part-time support for the world's largest free family history site https://familysearch.org This is very rewarding. I have helped others with the Family Tree and related FamilySearch products.
In 2010-2018 I served in the Edmonton_Alberta_Riverbend_Family_History_Centre..I have a FHC blog at Bill's Family History Center Blog Since 2020 I have been a family history consultant for Edmonton Alberta North Stake. For information on the Latter-day Saints and family history click https://www.comeuntochrist.org/

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Preserving a Blog

For the past few days I have been trying to preserve my genealogy blog of the past 14 years in a format that I can add to my Memories items in FamilySearch, (After all, I have spent the past month preserving old documents, and this seems like a worthwhile addition.)

I tried googling a solution, but when I tried the process that I found, It involved backing up a few blog postings as an XML file that I could not seem to do anything with.

After a few hours of puttering with this, I decided to see if I could find the Word file that I had created a few years ago. I found it, but it just had 2006-2009. Still it was a starting point. I decided to to use Copy and Paste to copy the postings from the blog itself into the Word file. This worked quite well. It was not the automatic solution that I hoped for but it was workable.

In the process of copying and pasting, I found a reference in my blog to software called blogspot2docx, that copies only the text, without the photos. I think I will try it on my FHC blog, I can let you know how it worked.

It apparently did not work. No file was created.

I also tried https://www.web2pdfconvert.com/ but it only copied the most recent few postings out of the 115.

Then I tried a process that worked:
Sign in blogger.com
Use the drop-down list in the upper left to select which blog
Click the "Try the new Blogger" button 
Click Settings > Posts > Max posts shown on the main page
I changed the default number to include all the postings
I opened the blog and used Ctrl+end to verify that all postings were visible now
Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C to copy the entire blog to the Windows clipboard.
Opened a new Word file 
Used Ctrl+V to paste the complete blog into the Word document
Printed the Word document to PDF (Selecting Microsoft print to PDF as the "printer")  

It took me maybe 10 minutes to figure this out and create the PDF file,
On my main blog it took at least 10 hours, largely spent fixing the apparently random areas of text that came up in tiny 9 or 10 point fonts that were too small to be easily read.

So if anyone else has the question of how to save an entire blog, this seems like the best answer, at least at present.

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