Whenever I write about blogging, I usually discuss the sociological aspects of it instead of the technical stuff, mostly because everyone and their dog already blogs about XML and Python and whatsit. Nevertheless, I have to start talking about that crap now because I’m getting more and more pissed off at edublogs.org. Why am I getting so much spam in my comments and why don’t you have an effective spam blocker up yet, huh edublogs? It’s been 2 hours since I cleared out all my spam comments and already there are 2 new comments extolling the virtues of online poker. I’m actually breaking my self-imposed rule of no computer use during the weekend because I don’t want to delete pages of spam on Monday.
Ok, screw this, I’m bailing. The only question is which bloghost I should go with. I like Daria.be [Link is now defunct] because it’s like edublogs, but better. It has more WordPress stuff like better spam protection, more themes, better site statistics, podcasting and Youtube support, daily backups, and you can even have your own forums.
Blogsome seems to have pretty much the same thing, but apparently you can tinker directly with the coding of your blog, which gives you a nice degree of flexibility. What say you, Blogsome users? And if anyone else has other free bloghosting services to recommend, do speak up.
I think I already know how to export and import a blog. This post from JAWW explains things easily enough:
- Go to RSS2MT
- Put in the URL for your blog’s RSS feed
- Save the crap that pops out as a .txt file
- Go to your new bloghost, which must be using either Movable Type or WordPress for their blogs
- Click the “Import” tab
- Import the text file that you saved
- World domination
There are a couple of klunky annoyances with the importing, as the original post mentions, but I’m sure they’re a lot less annoying than manually copying and pasting all of the posts that you have. My biggest problem is that it seems comments can’t be exported as well, which is too bad. Actually, I don’t have many comments, maybe I’ll just edit each post so that the comments are included within them. Anyway, the reason I’m being so detailed is that I’m putting this up for any other edublogs users who want to join me as I make a run for the fences. Property is theft, down with sexism, crush the Gang of Four, etc.
UPDATE:
Have been researching other bloghosts and have come across Blogiversity. They say that
Blog applications usually take 2 to 3 days to process. Why is there an application? Anyone can get a free blog these days. Our purpose is to create a community specifically for academic bloggers. We only want the best.
You have to tell them what subject you’ll be blogging about, which you pick out of a dropdown menu, and then you have to
Tell us a little about yourself (student, professor, research, hobby, etc.) and how you relate to this subject
Also, you have to give a sample blog post of 1-2 paragraphs. I’m not sure I like the whiff of elitism I get from this project. There’s always Anthroblogs, which is just for anthropologists. When I was deciding on bloghosts, I was actually considering either them or edublogs; maybe I would have been more satisfied with Anthroblogs. They could certainly use more people posting regularly.
UPDATE 2:
RSS2MT is flawed, it only exports a summary of the posts. However, since edublogs has just upgraded, you can just do Export now, and it exports everything too. So this workaround is no longer necessary.
Blogsome is the shiznit. It’s definitely better than Blogger or Blogspot, anyhow. Failing that, I would suggest getting a domain-name, installing Word Press and voila! Your very own weblog.
Yeah, I emailed A to ask her and she said it hasn’t sucked (I would’ve emailed you but I could see you were busy). I’ve created a test blog over there, it’s just annoying that posts should be such a bastard to import. I can’t believe I was actually trying to use a command line tool to import the posts since two days ago half of that statement would have been gibberish to me. It was nostalgic to be in DOS again, though.