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ArchiveTeam is downloading and saving content from Blogger
- AceJohnny2 3y agoThere are no known plans for Google shutting down Blogger.
- myself248 3y agoGiven that it's Google, that's cold comfort.
- skilled 3y agoYou could say the same about every product Google has shut down.
- pests 3y agoThere are no known plans for Google to keep Blogger either.
- rjh29 3y ago> No updates to Blogger have been documented since September 2020. Google has also moved away from Blogger for their own company blogs. For these reasons, Blogger may be at risk of shutting down.
- javchz 3y agoI found that a shame. I think with a lighter and modern UI, blogger could come back to gain some market share from Medium. Medium it's so bloated and clickbaity, that I would take an old regular blog in WordPress or blogspot despite being more ugly. A lot of technical documentation of some niches, is still only present in blogs of this kind.
- mikro2nd 3y agoIf you want to avoid "bloated" I can only recommend both bearblog.dev and mataroa.blog. (Full disclosure, I'm a paying user of mataroa, but no other relationship to either of those sites.)
- sgift 3y agoaka "This is a risk-based intervention. We don't know if it will happen, but there's a real risk and better start now than scramble later."
- pabs3 3y agoThey plan to delete accounts with no recent activity, including data from all Google properties. The only exception is YouTube for some reason. The wiki page is simply out of date.
- kelnos 3y ago> The only exception is YouTube for some reason. I wonder if they made a big list of the old content that would get deleted under their policy, and decided that some of that actually still brings in enough ad revenue to be worth keeping. And it was easier to just keep everything than make carve-outs to the deletion policy?
- dehrmann 3y agoI'm sure that's part of it, but content on Youtube is also more discoverable (despite Google running a search engine), and the platform is more active.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoThink it's more about the planned deletion of inactive accounts on 01 Dec 2023 that's going to take out a bunch of connected blogger sites.
- 8organicbits 3y agoShutting down, no. Deleting content, yes. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/your-old-google-account-will-be-deleted-in-just-weeks-how-to-save-it/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/your-old-goo...
- Dalewyn 3y agoAre you really willing to bet on Google not killing off a non-primary service?
- 11011001 3y agoThis is probably a better link than their project-tracker: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Blogger https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Blogger > No updates to Blogger have been documented since September 2020. Google has also moved away from Blogger for their own company blogs. For these reasons, Blogger may be at risk of shutting down. > Archive Team did a discovery between February and May 2015, but did not begin downloading actual content until November 2023.
- dang 3y agoOk, we've changed to that from https://tracker.archiveteam.org/blogger/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/blogger/. Thanks!
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoHow exactly does this work? Is this farming out the work of wget-ing URLs, followed by making those contents available on archive.org Wayback Machine? It seems trivial to poison the uploaded content. And there's no way to validate that the content has not been tampered with in flight, unless a redundant fetch were performed in a trusted environment, at which point farming out the work serves no purpose. Secondly, this doesn't solve the discoverability problem. Sure, after Blogger shuts down, a particular webpage on a blog might be preserved. But you will only be able to view its content 10 years in the future if you happen to already know the exact URL where it used to exist.
- pests 3y agoThis is the same process ArchiveTeam has used for all their previous work as well and there have been no issues. Isn't a potentially-tampered copy better than none at all?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago"This vulnerability has always existed and it's never been an issue in the past" is not a very robust approach to security.
- kelnos 3y ago> Isn't a potentially-tampered copy better than none at all? I guess it depends on the specific nature of the tampering, but I can think of quite a few situations where no copy is indeed better.
- svat 3y agoArchiveTeam had a similar project for Google+ and they also said they downloaded zillions of Google+ pages and uploaded them to archive.org, but I have never been able to find the Google+ profile of anyone I know via their uploads — try finding the Google+ posts of Linus Torvalds or Terence Tao for example (just to pick two people who used to post pretty frequently and whose posts I used to read). I don't think they ever did an investigation of why this happened; as far as I can tell they just lost interest after Google+ shut down, and did not try to figure out what went wrong or even try retrieving the posts of any public profile.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pests 3y agoThe ArchiveTeam project page for Google+ says it was ingested into the Wayback Archive, where I do find a complete Linus archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912 https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://plus.goo... Most of those are focused_crawls which would have been the result of efforts like ArchiveTeam. Then the full set is here: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googleplus https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googleplus
- svat 3y agoTry clicking on any of the links. I only get 302 redirects and blank pages; I don't get to read any of the posts. Basically, just as testing recovery is part of a backup strategy, testing the usefulness of the “saved” information ought to be part of any “saving” strategy. Edit: You can try links posted to HN e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=plus.google.com%2F%2BLinusTorvalds&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... or https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=102150693225130002912&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and see if you can read any of them via the archives.
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- fooker 3y agoI think blogspam is a decent source of ad revenue for Google, so it seems unlikely to shut it down anytime soon, at least until they figure out how to monetize LLMs.
- emodendroket 3y agoThis is one way to learn they're shutting that down.
- qingcharles 3y agoGoogle's email to me this week about Blogger was also how I found out I wrote a blog in 2006!
- pabs3 3y agoHere is the post about Google deleting inactive accounts soon: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-delete-inactive-accounts-starting-december-2023-05-16/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-delete-inactive-ac...
- wg0 3y agoPodcasts, Reader and Blogger. By end of 2025, ArchiveTeam should also archive Flutter SDKs. I don't have a good feeling about it.
- seanvelasco 3y agoi have very fond memories of exciting times creating and designing my blogger websites when i was in 3rd grade in my netbook (i learned to use the computer before i could read). the first site i created was a site for downloading PC games. if i was born earlier or later, those would've translated into web dev skills, and i'd be a dev much sooner. i'll try to recover my old gmail to check if my blogger sites are still okay.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beeboobaa 3y agoHow is this not considered mass copyright infringement?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 3y agoThe vast bulk of what the Internet Archive does is technically copyright infringement whether someone thinks it should be or not.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- giantrobot 3y agoDownloading publicly available content for preservation purposes? There's no sane argument that this doesn't squarely fall under Fair Use.
- kfk 3y agoThere was a really good (for me) Italian blogger I used to follow. Any way to recover his blog from the archive? Is this what ArchiveTeam will do? I have tried searching the current archive but I get only one page https://archive.is/http://comediventareilmiocane.blogspot.com/ https://archive.is/http://comediventareilmiocane.blogspot.co...
- dessant 3y agoWeb preservation projects usually submit their content to the Internet Archive, or at least make it accessible through the Memento protocol. It seems the blog you're looking for already has some archived pages. https://web.archive.org https://web.archive.org https://timetravel.mementoweb.org https://timetravel.mementoweb.org The asterisk at the end selects all the archived pages of the host: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://comediventareilmiocane.blogspot.com*
- kfk 3y agoThanks! I thought I’d never read these posts again, brings up memories of a gone by era for me. Back to reading blogpost now.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI hope blogger sticks around. Twice I have exported my content and imported into a blog I self hosted. Both times I went back to blogger because of ease of use.p, especially on mobile devices.
- markstos 3y agoIf you choose Blogger partly because it was free, and your blog got little to no traffic, that's not a sustainable business model for Google. They need ads or subscription fees to cover their hosting costs. If there were were a sufficient number of popular Blogger blogs, that could carry the financial burden of the unpopular ones, but the platform seems to be stagnant and unpopular, so that model doesn't seem to be viable either. I'm not sure what went wrong, Blogger had good market share years ago!
- ghaff 3y agoFewer personal blogs, Wordpress for many monetized sites that are real businesses, Medium, substack these days. Blogger is this in-between thing. Personally I still use it but it does seem uncommon.
- markstos 3y agoGhost managed to see growth in their simple SaaS blogging platform over the past 10 years. Google had the resources to adapt Blogger and help it find a niche to thrive it, but seems to have starved it of resources instead. Ghost's public, live financial metrics are here: https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/
- ghaff 3y agoGhost looks interesting. I agree Google has done almost nothing with Blogger. I’m a bit surprised it wasn’t shut down long ago.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoIt's traditionally very easy to download all the posts of Blogger blogs with a single HTTP request. If the format is nameofblog.domain.tld, then to get a JSON feed of all the posts, something like curl -sA "" https://www.blogger.com/feeds/nameofblog/posts/default This has worked for many years.
- simonw 3y agoDoes that get all posts? I thought it was just the first "page".
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agohttps://developers.google.com/blogger/docs/1.0/developers_guide_protocol https://developers.google.com/blogger/docs/1.0/developers_gu...
- simonw 3y agoDo you have an example URL that returns all of the posts for a large blog? I only managed to get a subset, but I might not have found the right example. (I wasn't sure where to get nameofblog from)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoWhy not share the large blog are trying to retrieve. Note that Google's own blogs no longer use Blogger.
- simonw 3y agoHah, that explains why I couldn't find an example blog that this would work on! I was trying it against https://blogger.googleblog.com/ https://blogger.googleblog.com/ I don't have any particular blog in mind, I just want to see how big an XML file that old platform is willing to serve me. I'm interested in streaming large responses generally, see https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jun/25/streaming-large-api-responses/ https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jun/25/streaming-large-api-re...
- sourcecodeplz 3y agoI don't think Google will shutdown Blogger. There are some HUGE Blogger blogs out there. There are also many local community-focused blogs that get loads of comments. Blogger is very much alive and earning money for Google via AdSense. They did shutdown the subscribe-to-posts via email feature, which was like a free unlimited subscriber newsletter. I don't even want to get into why Blogger is so great, because if I say what I know, people will start abusing it.
- echelon 3y ago> There are some HUGE Blogger blogs out there. Such as? I'm not aware of any. > I don't even want to get into why Blogger is so great, because if I say what I know, people will start abusing it. Unlimited uploads? Sharing full pirated movies on Blogger?
- ghaff 3y agoI’ve occasionally toyed with moving from Blogger to something else. But whenever I’ve done so and investigated alternatives it’s looked like a lot of work and would cost money. Want a homepage too.
- maksimur 3y agoIs it because your blog has dynamic content?
- ghaff 3y agoIt’s really nothing fancy but I need a homepage and I want blog posts that may or may not have images and a lot of Wordpress templates would take customization to get what I want—and I don’t really want to have to learn a bunch of web stuff to do.
- Aachen 3y agoNote that "Blogger" here, which I had never heard of, means Blogspot which I think most people will come across regularly, so actually very useful to have a backup of (See the first sentence under the "strategy" section, as well as that they say blogger.com/profile/NUMBER redirects to a blogspot subdomain)
- seltzered_ 3y ago"Pyra Labs launched Blogger on August 23, 1999." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service) I think those of us that remember the Internet from 20 years ago think of Blogger as the company and CMS and blogspot.com as merely the hosting domain.
- Aachen 3y agoFew people would refer to Google's analytics tool as Urchin though, and that has been fewer than 20 years Blogger seems to not have been on my radar though I was around then, and is such a generic word that imo it's not a clear name to use when Blogspot is also available and everyone knows it
- internet2000 3y agoThe product is still called Blogger.
- aendruk 3y agoFor another perspective, I’d have told you that what I formerly published my blog with was Blogger, with no thought about the blogspot domain name. I think of the latter as just the fallback they offered for people without their own hosting.
- K0balt 3y agoAny suggestions on downloading an entire blogger blog in a relatively easy way? (Without admin credentials for the blog)
- pabs3 3y agoSend ArchiveTeam the link on IRC or here and we can save it to archive.org, then later you can use wayback-machine-downloader to grab it from archive.org. https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader
- gavinhoward 3y agoAck! My old blog was still viewable, and it should not have been! Is there any way I can contact ArchiveTeam and ask them if they already archived it?
- femboy 3y agoWhat's the URL?
- gavinhoward 3y agogavinhoward.blogspot.com
- noname120 3y agoSee the sweet stats in real-time: https://tracker.archiveteam.org/blogger/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/blogger/ You can contribute to the effort by running these two simple steps on your vps or home network: docker run -d --name watchtower --restart=unless-stopped -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock containrrr/watchtower --label-enable --cleanup --include-restarting --interval 3600 docker run -d--label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true --restart=unless-stopped atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/blogger-grab --concurrent 20 hackernews You can launch the second command several times to run multiple worker containers in parallel. On a low-end VPS you can easily run 2-3 of them. With better resources, you can run 10 of them, 20, or even more! Important: don't use VPNs, proxies, hotspots, etc.