Note: This is one of a series of posts I’m doing about exporting your Vox content to other sites.  See here for my introductory post about porting your main blog over.

For those folks who choose to export to TypePad, word on the street is it will back up your audio files and make them available on your new blog there.  But what about those folks who chose to go a different route (e.g. WordPress, Posterous, etc)?  Those export tools don’t back up audio, which may leave you frustrated, especially if you have files that you no longer have on your own computer, for whatever reason.

Two solutions for those folks:

1) Simplest way to back up specific audio files is to download the files individually.  Install my Greasemonkey script (must have Greasemonkey installed first) and then go to the individual page for one of your audio files (e.g. this is a specific page for an audio file).  Once the script is installed, you’ll see a “Link to mp3″ link that you can right-click on and download the .mp3 to your computer.  You’ll have to rename it, but at least you’ll have the file again!

2) You can try a program I wrote a while back called Vaudio to create a list of all of your blog’s files, hyperlinked to the .mp3 files on a single page.  Once you have the list, you can use DownThemAll (or any other download assistant) to download them all at one time to your computer.  The page and the instructions are here (sorry, they’re as clear as I could make them without spending a lot of time on it).  Some caveats to note:

• This is alpha-alpha-alpha software – I did some testing on my own blog and W.B. Mook did some with his library, but I certainly haven’t had a lot of testing or time to bugfix it
• It runs on my webhost’s server, and it crawls your library.  If it can’t get the next page, it thinks it is done.  This means that if Vox is bogged down, or a lot of people are trying to use it, it may not work correctly.  You may want to try again later or download what it listed, copy the URL of the last file listed and use that as the first for next time, so it can keep chunking along.
• PLEASE USE THIS ONLY FOR BACKUP OF YOUR OWN BLOG.  I was never going to make this public without some sort of authentication routine to ensure that you could only grab content from your own blog, but there’s no time for that now.  If you’re grabbing content from other people’s blogs, you’re violating copyright restrictions and can get me in a lot of trouble for hosting a tool that let you do so (see recent Pirate Bay rulings).

I’d urge everyone to back up to TypePad, if for no other purpose than easily and legally backing up your audio files.  But if you have no urge to create and export to a TypePad blog, the above should help you keep your precious audio files that you no longer have on your own computer.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Exporting to TypePad – Bugs and Workarounds
2. A Call for Alpha Testers for My Vox Export Tool
3. Goodbye Vox??? (aka How to Pack Your Bags and Regroup)

So yet another of my Vox neighbors has decided that the crap Vox and SixApart has forced us all to deal with lately for the last 6 months or so is not worth the benefits of sticking with the Vox community.  He's going to be missed, but at least he'll be blogging elsewhere, so you can keep up with his posts, if you are so inclined.

One of the main reasons I first joined up with Vox was for the community aspects.  I had heard interesting things about the varying privacy levels of posts, photos, and media, and when I came and checked it out and saw all the connections and communication that were driven by the Vox neighborhoods, dashboards, etc., I jumped on board.  I got a great kick out of being able to quickly and easily take a look at all of my neighbors' posts, comments, photos, etc., and join in on some conversations and easily share my own posts with others in my neighborhood.  However, as the number of folks in my neighborhood grew, the means of interacting with them through Vox's interfaces seemed to shrink, until now I find it a pain to try to keep abreast of even the most prolific writers in my neighborhood unless I read their posts in my RSS reader.  Only occasionally do I venture onto the site and navigate the blank screens and laggy loads to seek out the neighborhood-only posts from those I haven't heard from in a while.

For the moment, I'm still sticking around here.  I haven't posted a lot recently because of my busy work/home schedules, but that also has the quasi-beneficial side effect of not allowing me to get too pissed off with Vox (yet) to want to ditch the buggy servers for another service (or my own personally-hosted site).  I can see such a move coming, however, if things don't improve here when I do end up having more time to write.

I'm still working on my Vox export tool to allow someone to back up (export) their entire public blog archive to an .xml file that can be imported into a WordPress/Blogger blog.  I doubt it'll be the web tool that will cause a full-scale diaspora of Vox users to other utilities, but hopefully it'll be useful for the more-than-a-few folks who are abandoning ship for another service that appears a bit more stable and still appears to be trying to innovate, rather than just grab all the advertising money it can while it's still afloat.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Goodbye Vox??? (aka How to Pack Your Bags and Regroup)
2. So Much for VoxPort – WordPress.Com Imports Vox Blogs Directly!
3. State of the Vox Export Tool

Logo

Recently, I've been trying out a free online service from Techrigy called BlogBackupOnline.  Up until now, I wouldn't have recommended it for Vox users due to a bug that wouldn't let them back up my posts past a certain date in history.  However, now they've fixed that and I feel comfortable recommending them here on my blog.

What It Is
What BlogBackupOnline claims to be is "an effortless way to backup, restore, and export your blog".  Supporting more than 10 different blog sites (including the big ones of LiveJournal, Vox, Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, and WordPress), BlogBackupOnline crawls a specified blog for all your posts and comments, and creates a backup on their third-party servers.  Once the blog undergoes one full backup, you can then turn on daily update scans, that will record changes made to your entries, new comments, and back up any entries made from that point on.

How It Works
Once you sign up for a free account (50 Mb storage per account), you can register one or more blogs to be backed up using this "full scan" crawl.  After the scan is completed (took me about 7 minutes for ~200 entries in my blog history), you can enable the daily scans.  From that point on, all the existing entries, are scanned daily for changes and new comments, which are then added to the blog's backup.  New entries are also backed up the same way.

Dashboard

The Backup
Once your entries are backed up, you can go check it out using the dashboard provided at the BlogBackupOnline website.  The "Content" tab shows you all of the individual entries, and selecting any one of them will show you the full HTML backup of that page, as well as all the comments that have been backed up.  Although some people may only want the text portions of their posts backed up, I like having the HTML because it includes all hyperlinks, text formatting, etc.  Plus, if you ever want to restore/transfer your posts in the future, you're probably going to want this info.  There's no way to turn off the backup of all HTML, though, so for now it's like-it-or-lump-it.

Restoring Your Blog
Although BlogBackupOnline claims to restore blogs, there is NO option yet for restoring a Vox blog.  Although this may be due to the nature of the Vox platform, I hope that at one point in the near future, BlogBackupOnline will have a means to restore individual posts or full blogs to Vox blogs.  In the meantime, you can restore/transfer your posts to Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, or Windows Live Spaces.  You can, of course, copy/paste an individual entry from the backup into the Vox compose screen, but that defeats the real purpose of the restore feature and would be tiresome for someone with a large number of posts.

Exporting Your Blog
Are you one of those untrusting souls who can't stand not to do it yourself?  You can always export the entire backup's contents to a single .xml file (in RSS 2.0 format) via the export tab on the dashboard.  You can do whatever you like with it, including burning a copy to CD in case you want a hard-copy backup.  (Theoretically, you could try doing a Vox import off of this file if you hosted it somewhere, and see if Vox was able to pull it all in – that might get around the "restore" issue, but I can't vouch that this works.  If someone would like to test this and let me know, I'll update the review to let everyone know how it works.)

Other Features
The dashboard also contains a "log" tab that lets you view status of recent full/daily update scans (helpful, but not necessary unless you're paranoid about ensuring your backups took place).  There is also the option to back up "media files" (currently images), but this doesn't seem to apply to Vox blogs, as checking this box made no change to the backup content of my blog.  With a 50 Mb storage limit, I'm not sure you'd really want to back up media anyways – you might be constantly pushing the limit if you tend to post a lot of photos on your blog.  A better way would be to post your photos on flickr and link to them via Vox, if they're that important to you.

In Summary
BlogBackupOnline provides a quick-and-easy means to back up your blog.  I like the ease of signing up and setting up an account.  Tech support was very courteous and quickly responded when I had issues with my backup, and worked to fix the actual bug I discovered, rather than just putting it on a "to-do list" for a future rev of the site. 

While the site DOES say that "backups are free during the beta period" and gives no indication as to when this beta period will end or what the fees will be after that point, it IS a free service for use right now, and does a good job of doing what it is supposed to do.  At the very least, it provides a modicum of protection for your blog in case of catastrophic loss of posts/comments.  I'd recommend anyone without a backup solution in place currently to look into signing up.  It only takes a couple of minutes of your time, and can't hurt you to try it out.  Because really, who wants to lose their posts?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. State of the Vox Export Tool
2. Exporting to TypePad – Bugs and Workarounds
3. So Much for VoxPort – WordPress.Com Imports Vox Blogs Directly!