There are several reasons why you may want to keep an archive of your posts on an Edublogs site. These include:
- you’re leaving a school and will lose access of your site
- you would like to keep an archive of your year
- You would like to collate a series of posts for your eportfolio
It is a good idea to export your Edublog site as an xml file. This will allow you to upload your posts to a new blog e.g. a free one at http://www.wordpress.org or http://www.blogger.com (make sure that you register/login with a personal google account, not your work account). The xml file will contain your posts and comments. When you import the xml file into a new blog, the new blog will try to make copies of your media from your old blog; this means that the old blog must still be online. Note that this process sometimes fails.
Whether or not you’re successful creating a new blog that’s an image of your old blog, you may be interested in accessing your old blog as an ebook. It is not possible to “read” an xml file. If you want to read your posts without creating a new blog, it is a good idea to create an ebook from your posts. I have tested* the following sites with okay results (details follow):
- http://www.blogbooker.com/ saves in pdf format with good formatting; book in chronological order; includes images and links to online video/sites
- http://bloxp.com saves in epub format with no media and little formatting; book in reverse chronological order; embedded media ignored. Limit of 250 posts.
- http://blog2book.pothi.com/app/ saves in pdf format with images; book in reverse chronological order; embedded media ignored; 100 posts limit within the given time range; only includes posts within the last year.
If you’ve embedded media in your blog by uploading them directly to Edublogs, you may want to download them. This is also important if you haven’t imported your xml file into a new blog or if you had any problems copying the media into the new blog from the old blog. Since you uploaded the media to your blog in the first place, you probably have it saved on your computer (and have backed it up). If that’s not the case, you can use DownThemAll on Firefox. It’s the best tool that I’ve found for this purpose. Even if you’re a devout Chrome or Safari user, pull out Firefox for this task.
How to Download Media with DownThemAll
- Install the DownThemAll addon to Firefox
- Log in to your Edublogs site dashboard and go go the Media page
- For each of your media pages:
- Go to Tools | DownThemAll Tools | DownThemAll!…
- Go to Pictures and Media and press Start!
- The files will be saved in your default downloads folder. I suggest creating a folder and moving all your blog backup items (including the media) into that folder.
* I tested all three options about a year ago to assist teachers who were moving. I checked the documentation to confirm process/features.