Just when I had started consoljng myself for having deleted my blog without verifying the backup, Tina suggested something that could help me recover my blog. What she said wassomething so simple that I should have tried doing that the moment I lost my blog. But I didn’t.
She knew that I visit a website called Technorati (I’ve tried telling her that it is a blog search engine and not a website) quite often. She also knew that my blog is registered there and if she searches my blog on “that website”, she can see the latest posts from my blog. This means that the Technorati databse is caching my site else how would they know what I publish on my blog. That’s obvious you would say, but it didn’t occur to me. Instead I was googling to find ways to hack the Google cache. Using Google to search for ways to hack Google, ironic isn’t it?
Anyways, back to my blog. I logged into Technirati to see what I could salvage from there. When I didn’t much, I googled for procedures to view the Technorati cache. As always, Google didn’t fail me and one of the results it acem up with took me to a forum post by Paul giving a 3-4 line tut on how to just that.
But the procedure Paul talked about wasn’t perfect, probably Technorati had made some changes since he got that procedure to work. So I tried applying my own brain and guess what, it worked: Now I am so pleased with my efforts I thought I should post it on my blog for anyone else who might need it.
Viewing Technorati’s Cache for Your Blog
Here’s how you can view the cached version of your posts on Technorati:
- Log into Technorati and find your blog. Click the Favorites link right at the top of the page.
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- Now you must add your own blog to your favorites. To do so, in the left sidebar of the page that displays, enter the website URL.
- In the Tags enter the tags you want to add for the bog. Of course, seperate consecutive tags with a space, and enclose the tag in double-quotes if it includes more than one word. Here comes the fun part, in the Tags field, rather than entering random words, enter the category names from your blog and click Add.
- In the page that displays, click the All link in the My Tags panel on the left sidebar. Technorati displays a list of not only the recent, but all the posts from your blog.
- Now click the Show details link below each post to view its full text.
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Once you have copied all your posts in a text file, start posting them back onto your blog.
Tips & Tricks
- You can use the Post Timestamp feature to set the post date of the new post to match the post date of the original post.
- You will not be able to retrieve any images/files you may have added to a post.
- Hover your mouse over the posts title on Technorati to display its Alt text, which is the same slug you used for the original post. Use this slug in the new post as well. This will minimize permalink errors. Needless to say, you will have to use the same permalink structure you used in your old blog. In my case it is
/%category%/%postname%/yours may vary.
This process is very time-consuming process depending upon the number of posts in your old blog and also on the number of posts you want to salvage. If you had about a hundred posts in the old blog and want to salvage all, rest assured, by the end of it, you’ll have a mirror image of your old blog and really sore hands.But hey, it’s any day better than losing it all for ever.
Does anyone else know any other way to recover posts from a permanently deleted blog?