Here's a sample of the April blog for the experiment

Okay, we started with my StudyingDecay2 blog from April. I added a photo, a capture from a newspaper test photo I was playing with and threw together a little post on it. This can be seen below. Further down.

This blog entry was made on 04-05-2009.

The question is can we export out this as XML find the date published, change it, and then import it into the earlier March blog?

(If we can do this we can add a bunch of photos under the earlier march date and march blog without adding a new month in the side bar.) The ANSWER by the way is YES we can do this.

This was mentioned by some bloggers out there who prefer to have all the files and photos under one month to have one sidebar with no multiple months on the side. I suppose with hundreds of photos it might actually be nicer to have them broken down into months, but if bloggers want to pile all the photos under one month, they can merge blogs using this simple export, change PUBLISHED dates and import technique.

Exporting the April (new blog) out so we can change it

STEP 1:

We're going to export the blog from the blogger tools.

(You are going to want to note the name of the title of the first blog in your NEWER blog to search for it as we edit the file.)

You don't have to be concerned with the following information, but this is what I can see from viewing the XML code.

This exported blog becomes XML source code which can be imported. This source code has LINKS coded inside it that point to all the various parts of your blog on Google. We can export and import this blog, and it's just code that has a ton of links and layout information for your blog, but it doesn't contain everything you uploaded, for example, imbedded pictures. There are just links or pointers inside this code that points to locations on the server that Google has which has your photos and other things, even comments that other users have made.

FInding the Blog Entry in the XML export of April blog

Okay, I've opened up the XML file that I downloaded from my new April blog. I'm searching for the actual title of the first blog that I want to import. In this case, I only have one blog title I'm interested in. It's called "A Sample TItle For This Test Goes here".

I just searched for "A Sample TItle For This Test Goes" by cutting and pasting the title from the old blog into the search inside WORDPAD, textpad or whatever editor I'm using. I quickly find the first blog post.

Now we'll look for the PUBLISHED date, which is in the text above the title, somewhere after the 1999 identifier.

Here's a bunch of data for this blog entry.

Notice the highlighted text. It starts with a 1999, but there are a TON of 1999 indentifiers in the XML file, and this one is near the bottom. You can't just open up the file and look for a 1999. You need to search for the actual title of the blog entry to make the search easy and find the first blog entry.

But here we can see the 1999 and all the other data that follows it. We are ONLY concerned with changing the PUBLISHED date.

That date need to be changed to import it into the older blog and get the older post date for the blog post.

The actual Published date has been located

Now that we've found the actual published date for this blog entry as it was posted on 04-05 on the newer blog, we can change it to 2009-03-31 to get it ready for importing. We change all the blog entries in this edited XML file if we want to import 10 blog entries, we'll have to change 10 dates in the file before saving it.

Some people might wonder about that second date, called published/updated, we don't need to worry about changing that date, that will be changed during the editing process to today's date anyway, so there is no need to change it.

The date has been changed for this post

See the published date. It's not very far from the 1999 identifier for this Blog entry. The published date has been changed to 2009-03-31 in this case. Because I want this post to go into the march blog as a March posting.

If I had a dozen blog entries I wanted to insert I could change all their PUBLISHED dates. Each one would be after the following 1999 indentifiers, which would be further down and follow the same basic pattern and layout. You'll see the titles for each blog entry following the PUBLISHED date. Each date could be changed. I could even change the time, from the 8:05PM time (shown in MILITARY TIME as 20:05) in this case to a later time as well. In any case, the time date stamp would import into the older blog (March in this case) according to the publish dates and times as I've reset them.

I simply save the file after changing the dates and reimport it. (See next two examples below.)

Saving the changed XML with changed publish dates

QUICK TIP: Save it as a different name to make sure you have the original in case you make a mistake.

Okay I've changed the publish dates for all the blogs I want to import in this.

In this case it's just one blog entry and it's set to 03-31-09. It's time to save it with some kind of name I can easily find to import into my older March blog.

I save it to the hard drive and will import it into the older March Blog.

Last Step, Publishing new imported blog entries

Okay, we've changed the exported entry dates. We've imported it and now we publish it, as you can see the publish dates have changed and reflect dates in the earlier month, so this new entry will look like an older one in the earlier months blog.

The original unchanged entry is below, It has the original publish date and comment on it. As you can see I modified the information and played with it a bit before importing it and of course the new publish date shows up in the March "studyingdecay" blog. Because I changed the date but the time stamp was not the most recent March entry, it was merged into the older March blog, but wasn't the latest entry, because the time was actually earlier than some of the March posts. Both TIME and DATE have to be most recent if you want these entries to appear as the latest posts in your earlier blog.

You could even modify the dates in the earlier blog if you wanted to do a massive change in a bunch of dates first. There's a lot of flexibility. If you rename the exported blogs and make sure you've exported them all to your hard drive and work on copies, you can always restore the original blog if there's a problem.

ALSO NOTICE: the Published date is only in march for one of the imported posts, because I only changed the PUBLISHED date for one of the blog entries during my test. If I would have tried to import both of these you can see the first one would have brought the April date which was unchanged during my edit of the XML exported blog. I didn't want to import both of them during this test, so I just imported the 03-31-2009 single post that I changed.

A Sample TItle For This Test Goes here

As you can see this has little to do with the Detroit blog here. This is just a test and I"m exporting the XML and comparing this added with the previous. The goal being to figure out if I can do raw manipulation, imports and exports of the blog and what modifications to the XML will allow me to merge and modify posts to bring more than one month under one month. If there is a simple way to manually do this, it might be kind of beneficial. There may be some tools to do this as well, but for now I'm trying the basic hack the raw export data, then reimport it method.

Before And After

One question we had on the Life After The Oil Crash website forum was, "where is the before and after" of the aspects of decay. That's a good question. One of my goals may be to get full Google Earth tours out there somewhere on an FTP website somewhere. With a Google Earth Tour you can load up Google Earth on your machine and actually step through the tour and see the actual location on a Google Earth map of "where" the photo was actually taken. Which seems okay from a tour trivia perspective, but the really nice thing about it is, when you can take a photo or original and zoom down to the Google Street map view. If there's a street map view from Google, you can get a 360 panorama that Google took maybe only a year or two or maybe even 3 years ago of the same building. Then take a look at it and compare it with the photo posted on the tour. Instant before and after, decay presented in front of you. See the above as an Example.