Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

I realized that I had never documented a feature that I make good use of for backing up all my blogs. It's an export blog. You'll need the OtherBlog plugin.

What I did was to create a new blog just for this purpose. It has no entries, just a bunch of index templates (I deleted all the standard ones since they're not needed). I created a series of index templates that will create an export file for each of my blogs. You can get the export file template from the "export blog" link above. The output filename is set to a name based on the blog's name (for example tips.txt for this blog).

The "export blog" link above suggests using an automatic rebuild script and/or cron job, but I had problems getting those to work on my server, so for right now I rebuild the blog manually. Also because of server limitations, I found that the exports from Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs and another large blog that I have would time out when rebuilding. This would also happen if I tried to use MT's built in export utility on these blogs. To get around this, I created multiple export templates that each create an export file for a certain number of entries. Use the lastn and offset attributes for this. AMIB has no fewer than five export files now, two for the veiled4allah category, two for The Clipboard category, and one for A Quranic Journal category. This is not something you can do with the export utility so that's a big benefit of creating export files this way.

In addition to having export files, my backup blog also backs up my templates. I'm using a plugin called ShowTemplates for it; however, this plugin no longer seems to be available so you might try the Template plugin instead. By using the ShowTemplates plugin, I now have a series of index templates that create pages displaying my templates for all my blogs, as a backup.

All of this in one place to handle backups for six blogs. Pretty cool.