When I first started blogging I did it as a way of storing all the new information I was coming across in my new job. For example, I started the How do I...? Library Help Desk FAQ blog to keep track of the questions students were asking me and other library workers in the Information Commons. It started out listing and answering student questions about computers, technology, software, and Office 2007. I wasn't concerned if the blog disappeared. We could always find a way to re-post them. This semester things changed on campus. All courses taught gained an online component in our eLearn or online course management system. The school added more online courses and our library became a hub to access these added features.
Now we began to get questions about the online courses and how to get around in them. We had students asking us how to use their email and self service class registration service, called banner. The questions we added to our blog grew and I needed to find a way to back up my blogs. Where once I did not concern myself with the whimsy of losing all the FAQ, now I worried about saving them. I went to the blogger Help and typed in "back up blog." I couldn't really follow their version of backing up my blogs. It did point me to a blog advisor at How Can I Do That and I found two options for saving my FAQ.
The first is to copy and paste each post into another document on my PC or external hard drive, which would have been very time consuming. I haven't written off doing this but I wanted something faster. The second option was to use the Mozilla Firefox browser and an addon called Scrapbook. Scrapbook lets you screen capture sections or entire web pages and save them to a root folder or a folder in scrapbook. I got busy and did this but made the mistake of saving to the new folder. If I had saved to the root folder I am suppose to be able to copy this to a PC or external folder. I'll get back to you on how it goes.
