please empty your brain below

Just a thought. Could you keep your monthly archive pages but within them, link to 4 x weekly (or approximately weekly) pages?

Work, yes, but it would still give manageable appearance in your sidebar.

A Wordpress template should be adaptable to your current design without too much hassle. Probably best handled with your own domain too (I see there are still some variations of the name available) and web space. I don't know what sort of bandwidth and capacity you'd need....I have some spare if you want to drop me a line.

I don't know how easy it is to import old blogger posts into Wordpress but I believe it at least used to be possible.

My sympathy, it's a right pain!

There are a lot of terrific posts stored away in your archives. I'll keep my fingers crossed that you manage to rectify this problem soon. Good luck!

Appalling - I hope some tech-savvy reader can help you breathe them back to life.

Hmmm. Like I've always said, no such thing as a free lunch, in this world. I'm actually amazed it's lasted as long as it did.

But, at least there *are* ways of getting the missing posts back, even if they're not very appealing.

And I did note it said "helpful" thoughts, but I do feel strongly that if one pays nothing, then one can't really expect anything, and doesn't really have a right to complain.

On your traffic, the hosting costs would be hundreds of pounds a year I suspect. Someone's been paying for that up to now...

I think NiC is right - you could do a lot worse than getting a domain name and using something like Wordpress, then you can customise the template to do what you want it to do. It's a bit of a faff, but you would be in control of your blog, not the techies at Google.

I posted earlier, but I included a link and got spam blocked.

I fell out with Blogger around the time that Google bought them, and the server responses were slow or non-existent. Also, I posted thousands of responses on a writing forum, only for the owner to throw a hissy fit, and take the site down. Since then, I have my content on my domains, safe and secure.

Anyway, I agree with some of the others. Self-hosting with Wordpress would be my inclination. These days, webhosts aren't so stingey with their webspace and, more importantly for you, bandwidth. Do I remember that you've already snaffled the dg.co.uk domain?

choose on of the simple new-style templates, take a deep breath, and customise it to re-produce something similar to current look.

take the opportunity to spring-clean the look anyway, nothing should remain entirely unchanged.

it won't take too long.

I did move to WordPress from Blogger and although I had to choose a template quite unlike my original, everything, including comments were transferred.

Yes, WP does take some getting used, especially the dashboard/editor whatever it's called. However, ScribeFire, the Firefox add-on, is very simple to use.

Go for it, DG, before Blogger truncates all of your archives.

it's time for your own (paid) hosting, so that no one is in control of you, except yourself.

diamondgeezer.wordpress.com is not what you want, you want your own registered domain - not a free wordpress.com one.

and then - big gulp - yes, you have to transfer over all your old stuff.

you did seem to suggest you have more "play" time in your life the other day rather than work or sleep, so .... :-)

When I was in Dublin the other week I saw a woman wearing one of the hoodies Blogger gave away if you subscribed to Blogger Pro... remember that?

Wordpress is pretty nifty and I'm pleased I made the jump there (Typepad will charge you and wipes your blog when you unsubscribe).

Incidentally, All Quiet In The East Stand's Haloscan comments have now been forcibly migrated over to JS-Kit. It's a bit rubbish.

I also made the jump to Wordpress from Blogger, and the dashboard did take some getting used to, but once I'd got used to it having two dashboards (global/my account, and then for my individual blog), I got my head round it. WP offers way more than Blogger does (and the visitor stats are pretty good too). WP comes in two varieties, and the second one, wordpress.org, is something you can download and install on your own server space, and host using your own domain name. The installed version is also much more tweakable than the wordpress.com version. I haven't done this installation and hosting yet, but am preparing to do it. "All it takes is one hosting decision" - yes, and there's an opportunity for you to take a hosting decision of your own :-) Good luck - I love reading your blog, and I hope you find a solution that works for you soon.

...and for some reason, my homepage is showing up on that last comment as my Twitter account, even though I'd changed the info in the box. Ah well ;-)

The archive pages are dynamically created and derived from the URL you supply, hence you *could* possibly find a way to make use of this feature where http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2010_02_14_archive.html will call up other pages previously hidden. Well, play around to see how it works, anyway.

cf. http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2010_01_28_archive.html

Seriously, I'd suggest getting your own hosting. A lot of companies offer 'one click' Wordpress installs too, which takes half the hassle out of it.

Ahhh. Thanks, I'd noticed it but hadn't had time to investigate.

I've managed a quick partial fix by switching all the subsidiary pictures to my own server (rather than blogspot's) and I think I may have got a couple more days, but don't have a whole 30. On the other hand, I'm not certain. Have to spend some time over that.

I have my own domain set up and I'll see if the blogger image hosting works from a wordpres install on a non-blogspot domain. When I have the time....

Self-hosted Wordpress is an option, of course, but from my own experience with a blog of 4,000 - 5,000 posts, not without it's serious drawbacks. Although I installed all manner of plugins to cache the data and keep it under control, with a blog that large, it still sucked up more server resources than I was allowed on my "corporate" (better than average) hosting plan. The resources needed to run a Wordpress blog the size of diamond geezer would probably require paying for the sort of hosting normally required for a small-med company.

It's also a pain in the backside to keep updated every time Wordpress is tweaked into a new version. Wordpress was a hassle I gave up on in the end: downloaded my posts to a spreadsheet and am reposting those that matter, back into blogger, manually.

That's another thing - you can export from Blogger and import into Wordpress easily enough, but you can't go back so simply.

I know none of that solves the problem. I would have thought that a better solution from Blogger's point of view would have been to strip the content and make the archive pages into a list or index of posts, leading to individual post pages.

Which leads me to think that turning on individual post pages and changing to weekly archives (if necessary) would be the best, easiest and, of course, cheapest solution for you for the time being.

Just a quick point after Pamela's comment - Wordpress now offers automatic updates. Just log into your WP dashboard on your site, and it tells you there's an update available. Click on the link, and a few seconds later ... updated!

I would think your old posts would be available via http://web.archive.org but that site tends to be very slow. Sorry I can't offer any other solutions :-(

I dunno how much a self hosting thing costs - but if you go this option you could put up a pay pal button and I will happily contribute...

I used to be on a bulletin board that operated this way - they simply had a fund drive every six months.

Hi DG
I've emailed you some links to www.artisteer.com software for creating templates that is very adaptable, however there is a discussion about autopagination in classic templates that may help you http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=211d87eb120a771a&hl=en

If you added http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2010_01_15_archive.html as a link at the end of the Feb 14th item, then you could call it, say, Beginning of February Archive or February Archive Continued...

I know there's a bit of work to be done identifying and adding a link like that to around 90+ entries, but if blogger/google won't play ball and either add a tag to the custom markup list or enable you to turn the feature off, I can't see any other way that you haven't already covered.

It's a crying shame. I hope you find a solution you can live with.
A hassle you surely don't need though. (((hugs)))

The Wordpress disciples almost had me, until Pamela suggested they were wrong.

I really would rather stay than go, if possible. At the moment Audrey's workaround sounds like a promising stopgap (even though the link doesn't work).

Audrey's workaround is a major surprise; with Blogger FTP, the archive pages are completely static, so I never would have guessed that they were dynamically created for Blogspot sites. But now I've tried it... and whaddya know, it works. Example: Your "five equations of blog" post will still show up if you change the URL to something like http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2007_08_10_archive.html#347036302090432361 - so it should be possible to generate workable URLs for all of your themed weeks.

Looks like I can still link to chunks of posts (hurrah), but nobody else will find them unless they follow one of my links (sigh).

And those chunks will still terminate early if Blogger deems I've used too many photos.

I'm not very knowledgeable (ie. helpful) on these things, but it shouldn't be hard to customise one of the layout templates to look reasonable and silvery. I don't know about the fixed-column thing though, you might be stuck with that. They make it very easy to set certain things (colours, fonts, widths etc) but keep simple folk like me away from the nuts and bolts.

This is a complicated problem to fix. Here's hoping you'll find help and a solution somewhere. You are logical and calm and will hopefully have luck.
>Is it viable to have an archive of photos only, listed by date for now, with the text separate?
> Instead of weekly archives (of 400 pages) could you split your blogs into 1/2 month groups? Feb 1-15 2010 / Feb 15-28 2010?
Your archive is a treasure. I can only imagine your frustration right now. (my fingers are crossed!)

Quick question: do all Blogger Layout templates use fixed column widths?
(because, if so, I don't want one)

I am so low-tech and mistrustful of Google's long term storage ability that I print my blog off every month - no good for everyone else if it goes belly-up (I don't like being dependent on someone else's ability to pay their electricity bill), but I don't have as many readers, or indeed, anything like as much content as you to worry about. I am just going to be careful not to post more than thirty photos a month now!

Couple of other things I've thought of:

Wordpress.com isn't an option when you have so many posts. I tried that one before going with Wordpress.org, but by the time I'd passed around 1,000 entries Wordpress.com had shut down my account for violations of terms of use!

With new Blogger features you could add your own label to groups of posts for monthly features and those posts will then all appear together on one page. With a widget in a new style layout, you can also show those labels dynamically in your sidebar, so they'd be even easier to find.

The new layouts are more tweakable than they look. Even if they do all start as fixed width, there's no reason why they can't be changed to percentages. I've been playing with mine for a while, so I reckon I could take one of the standard ones and make it look as near as dammit to what you want. Just ask.

@Pamela - where are the terms of use for wordpress.com that limits the number of posts? According to WP's support pages, you get an unlimited database with the free blogs? You've got me worried now.

Surprised to hear of Pamela's wordpress.com woes - I adminster a community blog with multiple daily posts, and having notched up 2,675 posts in less than two years we've never had a problem.

DG, I agree that Blogger "labels" could be of use to you, in terms of grouping themed posts together with an auto-generated URL. They're equally available in "old" Blogger with a classic template and "posts on a separate page" switched off. (Although I'll concede that they do add clutter to the layout.)

Nothing to stop you embedding images from Flickr on the page, in place of the copies on the Blogspot server, providing that each image links through to its individual Flickr page (as per their terms of service). I've done it dozens of times, and it's not too laborious (although converting your existing archive would be horribly time-consuming).

Cheers mike.

I am absolutely not adding (visible) tags to every post - that's far too intrusive.

And hosting the photos elsewhere has no effect - Blogger still cuts you short (my August 2004 and August 2009 archives prove this).

Hi - I don't know anything about the photos issue, or converting from old to new blogger versions (or possible impact on existing posts) BUT you can use the "edit html" feature on current blogger to create your own template, or at least a heavily customised version, amending width of sections etc - see my blog above. You can certainly strip out a lot of the formatting and, to a degree, add some stuff of your own. If you want help with it, I'd be happy to offer suggestions - feel free to get in touch. Lee

@disgruntled I've no idea where in the Wordpress.com TOS there is anything against importing such a large number of posts. All I know is that all I did was begin to import them and part way through the exercise, the relevant blog ( http://pamelaheywood.wordpress.com/ ), then my entire account disappeared and was replaced with a violation page, without warning.

@mike I'm guessing it was the amount of importing activity all in one go (circa. 4,000 posts) that tripped the alarm bells (made it think it was machine-generated), thus you would not cause the same problem by posting a large number of posts gradually.

@diamond geezer Personally, I'd not see one more link at the bottom of a post as being intrusive, rather as an aid to navigation, but hey, it's your blog, your call. Offer still stands if you want any help with layout tweakery.

It's all still there at

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com

Thankfully the British Library has archived the blog more than once; if you follow this link: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100119152639/http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/ you will find the blog (and past posts) as it appeared in January 2010.

In the longer term, can I request that you find a publisher and print a lovely hardback version that I can keep on my bookshelves and peruse at my leisure?

dg, the Minima Stretch blogspot template is OK, you get a good width of column to write stuff in. It does have annoying things like you can only have the blog title in uppercase, but you could have your grey background and with a bit of fiddling it could look, if not he same, still recognisably Diamond Geezer. Might be worth it.

You should demand a 100% refund from Blogger right now!











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