What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I’ve struggled trying to find a way to back up my blog posts.

I’m using blogsome.com for my blog. It doesn’t have an export feature available, and I’m too unfamiliar with the type of software to find a way to add this capability on my own.

I hunted around both for a blog host and software that would allow this capability. Wordpress.com allows for importing and exporting, so that looked good. Trouble was I couldn’t get my information (about 400 posts!) out of Blogsome. Then I stumbled onto BlogBackupOnline (https://www.blogbackuponline.com/techrigy/) - a free backup capability. It also allows for exporting the backup to my computer.

Only problem with that was that it puts out what it calls an rss 2.0 XML formatted file.Nothing would put that into text for me on my machine, so I’ve got this funky file with all the XML tagging in it.

Then, for some unknown reason, I looked at my list of archives by month and thought - maybe I could just copy each month’s archive to my hard drive.

Along comes DownThemAll (http://www.downthemall.net/) an addin for Firefox.

Lo, and behold! Not only could I download each of the months’ archives, I could do it to separate subdirectories, and I could call each entry within each month’s archive up using Firefox.
Now, there may be a better, faster, more elegant way to do this than what I’ve come up with, but with my skills and luck, this has answered my prayer. If only I could get Blogsome to add one or two features - like archiving/exporting, auto-emailing me a copy of each blog post, or other content retrieval/retention features.

Link to What the Heck was I Thinking!?

News sources reported over the weekend, and on Monday, that Russian president-for-a-long-time Vladimir Putin rattled his nuclear saber at Europe and the West. According to BBC News (see below), he said he’d have to aim his missiles at European targets if they established an interceptor shield in Eastern Europe.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | NATO condemns Putin missile vow

If the American nuclear potential grows in European territory, we will have to have new targets in Europe,” Mr Putin said.

Excuse me? As everyone who’s studied this kind of thing has said, such a shield would be effective only against a very small number of incoming hostile missiles. This is why it has been described as aiming at defense against either Iran or North Korea. Russia has a lot of missiles with nuclear warheads.

So, in effect, Europe says they’re going to buy some bullet proof glass for their windows and Russia, quite naturally, says, “Do that and we’ll point our cannon at your house.”

Several Western leaders have indicated they would raise their concerns to Putin at the G-8 summit this week. I can imagine the conversation:

Western Leader: Why are you now targeting our cities? What benefit do you think you gain by that?

Putin: You decided to protect yourselves from one or two missiles. We must respond.

WL: But our actions were purely defensive and aimed at a rogue state, such as Iran or North Korea. It has nothing to do with you.

P: If that’s the case, then why aren’t you doing what I want you to do?

WL: Such as…

P: Such as taking down your missile defenses.

WL: Why, so that some guy who bought his missiles from you can threaten to send his one or two missiles with warheads to our cities - so he can blackmail us!?

P: Yes, I don’t want a repeat of most of the proxy wars and some of the other wars between US weaponry and Soviet or former Soviet weaponry. We lost too many arms sales because of the demonstrated superiority of US weapons. No more of that.

WL: Well, I’m not having it! You can just point your weapons where you want. I’m not budging. Hey, how’d you get that gun in here!!?

P: Now, just to show you’re friendly, take off that bullet-proof vest. The jacket and shirt too. Come to think of it, drop the pants as well, I don’t trust you to be unarmed.

Source: BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Nato condemns Putin missile vow