Victory! Blog posts restored

Well, it wasn’t how i wanted to spend my weekend, but i’ve managed to restore my blog entries since August 8th. Bloglines keeps track of the last two hundred or so posts, so that’s how i got the content, but they don’t show you html, rather what you see when you’re looking at a bloglines page is mostly javascript generated html. I’m not quite sure why they it that way, but it’s interesting. I’d had no idea how much javascript and ajax like code was in bloglines, it just doesn’t feel like it. perhaps it’s the design esthetics.

So i had to run a bunch of regexes over the bloglines page to extract html out of the content. Then i wrote up a small ruby script to parse it and use the xmlrpc lib to post it back to my blog.

It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but i was listening to rubyconf sessions while i mucked around. Anyway, i managed to restore everything but the comments. Now i’ve got the latest version of typo and it supports tags. So i suspect i’ll be moving away from the categories as i’ve never felt comfortable with exactly what categories i’ve had for anarchogeek.

The lesson learned is, even if you’re just mucking around with your blog, backup first, dump the db. :-) It’s probably why i’m a programmer and not a sysadmin.