Web Design in Oklahoma City

This morning, we launched our most recent upgrade bringing the blog import / export functionality online. You can take a look at our original post announcing this new functionality and see below for more details, a screenshot, plus some info on a couple of extra improvements made as well.

Blog import / export

Click "settings" on any blog element and then click the "advanced" tab. You'll find the blog import / export interface (see image below). Exporting is the simplest. Just click the export button and you'll be prompted to select where you want to save your file. The system will export a file in the Blog ML format containing all of the information about every post (including comments) in that blog instance. This includes posts you have aggregated by sharing them in from other blog instances as well. Once you've exported your file, you can keep it as a backup, transfer it to another blog element on our system, or transfer it to a new system.

Importing gives you a few more options. First, you need to make sure the data you want to import is in one of the accepted formats. Here is some information about supported formats.

• BlogML is an open standard for blog content supported by Community Server, DasBlog, Subtext, SingleUserBlog, Windows Live Space, WordPress, Blogger and others.
• WordPress XML (WXR) is an extended RSS format for the WordPress system.
• RSS is a common standard supported by most every blogging system. However, RSS feeds generally only contain a group of the most recent posts contained on a blog, so it may be impossible to import all of your blog's posts using its RSS feed. Also, RSS feeds do not always contain the comments associated with a post. Therefore, RSS should be a last resort for importing blog content.

You can try searching your current blog's help files or the internet for information about how to export your data into one of these formats. There are often special tools available for the major platforms. For example, here is an online tool that can automatically grab the data from a Blogger blog and convert it into BlogML. You may be able to find other online tools for your system as well.

Once you have your data in one of the approved formats, you can browse to your file (if it's on your computer) or give us the web address (if it's on the internet). Then, choose whether you want us to create 301 redirects for all of your posts. This is a good idea if you are moving data over from an existing blog. Then, click "import blog posts" and confirm that's what you really want to do.

Ordered class names on blog lists

Another blog enhancement for the designers out there is the addition of ordered class names to the blog list items. Whenever you have a list of blog entries displayed on a single page, they are rendered in an unordered list. Each blog post is contained within its own list item and that list item is now tagged with a class to indicate where it falls in order on the page. For example, the first post will receive the class "post1" and the second post "post2" and so on. This allows you to add styles to your CSS to do things like distinguish your first blog post to make it stand out from the rest. Or, distinguish your 3rd blog post, or your 11th. You get the idea.

Speed enhancements

Another part of this release are some significant speed enhancements behind the scenes. These are particularly noticeable on sites that contain a lot of pages. If your site has more than 100 pages, you will notice the pages loading a lot more quickly. This is thanks to some fancy back-end engineering from our development team.