New Feature: Import and Export

Today’s release brings another long-desired feature to Blogger: Import and Export of blogs. Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one.

To export your blog, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to the Settings > Basic page. You’ll see the Blog Tools links at the top of the page for importing and exporting. (We also moved blog deletion up here from the bottom of the page. Don’t worry about accidentally clicking it, though; your blog wouldn’t be deleted until you confirmed on the next page.)

Once you click “Export blog” and press the “Export” button on the next page, your browser will prompt you to save the XML file for your blog. Keep it somewhere safe as a backup, or import it into a different blog. You can import one blog into another from the Blog Tools links, or when creating a new blog. Look for the “Advanced Options” at the bottom of the page.

When you import a blog, all of the posts will get saved in an “imported” state. From there you can publish just a few, or all of them at once. Here are some ideas for what you can do with importing and exporting:

• Merge two or more blogs into one. Take the exported posts and comments from one blog and import them into another one.
• Move individual posts from blog to blog. After importing, select just a set of posts to publish and publish them with one click.
• Back up your blog to your own storage. You can keep your words safe and under your control in case anything happens to your blog, or us, or if you want to remove them from the Internet.
• Move your blog somewhere else. Our export format is standard Atom XML. We hope to see other blogging providers extend their Atom support to include import and export. And, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.

Caveats

• The export format currently only covers blog posts and comments to those posts, not blog settings or templates. To back up a Classic template, copy and paste the template code from the editor. To back up a Layouts template, use the Backup / Restore template option to download a copy of your template.
• Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
• At the moment there is a 1MB size limit on the blog you can import. This is a bug that we are correcting the issue.
  

Have you imported or exported your blog? Let us know about how it went in the comments.

New Feature: Embedded Comment Form

One of the most common complaints about Blogger’s comment form is that it’s on a separate page from the post, styled in a way that doesn’t match the blog. Our new embedded comment form addresses that by putting the comment form where your readers expect it: at the bottom of the post.



To turn on the embedded comment form, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to Settings > Comments for your blog. You’ll see that the “Show comments in a popup window?” setting has been replaced with the new “Comment Form Placement” setting. Just click “Embedded below post,” save your settings, and go check out a post to see your new comment form.

Additional Features

• The comment form works with Google Accounts, OpenID authentication, name / URL, and anonymous identities. As with the current comment form, we’ve set up shortcuts for a handful of common OpenID providers.


• Once you log in with a Google Account for one blog, you won’t have to log in to comment on other blogs during your browser session. Nevertheless, to protect your privacy, we use an <iframe> to keep your logged-in identity inaccessible to the blog itself.


• If you have a “Comment Form Message” set up, we put it on the post page above the comment form.


• If you require word verification for commenting on your blog, we’ll show the word verification form in a small dialog after you click “Post Comment.”


• Update, 6/27: The embedded comment form works with Classic templates. The <$BlogItemCreate$> tag will add the right HTML to your page.
  
  

Caveats

• If you’ve edited your template for the blog widget, you won’t automatically pick up the new code for the comment form. You’ll need to either reset the template by deleting the contents of the <b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'> element (backup your template first!) or copy the code from an unmodified blog. Update, 6/27: Amanda from Blogger Buster has written a howto post for updating a modified blog widget template. 


• The font color of the comment form is currently hard-coded to black. If your template has a dark background, this may make the “Comment As:” label hard to read.


• The embedded comment form currently does not support subscribing to follow-up comments via email, nor does it have a preview button.

How’s it working for you? Anything else you’d like to see? Does the comment form look particularly good or bad in your template?



Let us know in the comments, now with convenient embedded comment form technology.