In my previous post, I mentioned that I'm not participating in Write for Rights this year, for the first time in more than 15 years. This decision propelled me to introduce Write for Rights as a library program, which spreads the word, generates lots of letters, and helps me justify (to myself) not writing.
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The lost comments
In 2020, a series of unfortunate events led to the disappearance of thousands of comments from this blog.
Allan believes (insists) that this is his fault. He is definitely not responsible, as the trouble began with a very stupid, careless error on my part. But really, despite whatever errors we both made, the whole mess exists because Blogger's backup and restore system is a piece of crap. In fact, it is not really a backup system at all.
I won't recount the steps that led to this disaster. Suffice to say that in February 2020, all the comments on wmtc from July 2006 to February 2020 disappeared. These dates include peak wmtc, when -- in the golden age of the blogosphere -- a community of up to 50 or more commenters regularly posted their thoughts on this blog. Lively, fun, and interesting discussions often took place in comment threads.
The May 2019 file
I have a Blogger export (.xml) file from May 2019, that, if properly restored, would reduce the comment gap from more than 13 years to nine months -- nine months when comments weren't even that active.
However, the May 2019 Blogger .xml file is corrupted and will not upload. I've created various test blogs, and can import other .xml files, but not that one. And -- an important note -- none of the .xml files have ever imported comments. None. Ever.
An additional issue
After the February 2020 disaster, Allan was able to restore all the deleted posts, but their URLs had changed. This means internal links no longer work, except for posts on the "greatest hits" page, which I manually fixed. It also means that The Lost Comments now had no associated post to be attached to. The text of those posts still exists -- but the posts themselves, with their unique URLs, no longer exist. So the comments couldn't be restored to their original posts, regardless of Blogger's backup capabilities.
No help
Blogger's Help Community has been useless. Several people made some semblance of trying to help, but their answers made it clear that they hadn't read my post and weren't willing to engage on any but the most superficial level. I realize that the problem may not be fixable -- but no one came anywhere close to even trying.
My obsession
Since the comments disappeared in February 2020, I've been periodically obsessed with trying to restore them. I have a post in drafts titled "the lost comments of wmtc: making peace with blogger". There is only that title. I never wrote the post because I never made peace with it.
I now export/backup wmtc more regularly than I used to, and I periodically try to import the May 2019 .xml. I know that's supposed to be the definition of insanity, but it is also the definition of hope.
The plan
Earlier this year, I decided I would copy/paste the comments from the May 2019 file into the appropriate posts. I created a gmail account for this purpose, and I identified December 25-27 as The Comment Project. I don't celebrate Christmas, and three consecutive days off seemed like the perfect opportunity -- perfect enough that I gave up this year's W4R.
My plan was to copy all the comments on a post, open a new comment, paste in the original comments as one long comment, and submit. This seemed totally doable.
Until I opened the .xml file.
I had assumed that comments would appear after each post -- post, comments, post, comments, and so on. Bzzzt. The .xml file contains, in this order: the blog template, all the posts, all the comments.
Comments are not identified according to the post they were associated with, nor with the date of that post, but by the dates of the comments themselves. So if people were coming back to a thread and posting over several days, which is very typical, those comments would be spread out over several dates, and have no identifier to show which post they belonged with.
This may seem obvious to people who regularly work with .xml files, but it was news to me. Very, very unwelcome news.
I tried anyway
Call it tenacity, or stubbornness, or compulsion, it doesn't much matter. I have trouble giving up.
Allan and I copied the entire .xml file into a Word file: 17,490 pages.
Allan then deleted the template and the posts, shrinking the file to just over 7,500 pages. (Allan had to do this, as my computer would have frozen and crashed.)
He then did some fancy find-and-replacing to make the blocks of comments easier to see.
But here's the thing.
When this was a simple copy/paste job, I was willing to slog through it. But now there is decision-making involved. Reading, thinking, and decision-making. I simply do not have the bandwidth. The spoons. The energy.
Like most people who work full-time, my time outside work is limited, and I always feel that I don't have enough time to do the things I want to do. In addition, I have chronic illness that demands I manage my rest and energy levels. Do I want to use hours, days, weeks of my precious free time trying to determine what comments go where and pasting them in? No. I do not.
Still, I can't let go
Despite the realization that I don't want to devote the necessary time to it, I still mourn the loss of those comments, and I'm still considering chipping away at this project.
9 comments:
I am so sorry this has become such a terrible headache. I understand your compulsion to try and fix this, but I hope you know that those of us who commented during those years weren't looking to have our thoughts permanently memorialized as much as we were just responding at that moment to whatever you posted. I get that you want the "whole record," and I'd feel the same way. But I hope you aren't doing this for your readers who commented because I, for one, understand that those comments aren't as important to preserve as the posts you wrote. Who knows? I might totally disagree today with something I wrote ten years ago!
Hey Amy, thanks for this. This is definitely not for readers. It's completely for me. Partly because I want the whole record, as you say. Partly because those conversations were gratifying to me as a writer. And partly because when I share an old post with someone, it appears that no one read it, when I know it was a very popular post.
When Allan was helping me with the xml file, he noted that whether or not there are comments, or how many comments there are, doesn't reflect how many people read the post -- it never does. That actually made me feel better about it.
Eventually I will have to give this up. I keep thinking I have given up... then don't.
My mother was the world champion of losing stuff, forgetting where she had left something important: car keys, purse, parked cars, doctor's appointments, and, once, her passport while on her way to Europe, necessitating a dramatic high-speed drive from Logan back to 36 Cedar Lane Way to retrieve the damn thing. She was always blithe with it, but those around her had to pick up the pieces.
My brother, then and now, a person of many fine, wide-ranging talents and abilities, she tagged as 'Captain Finder' since he was so adept at cleaning up after her . No one ever said it, but I suppose if he was Captain Finder, I must have been Private Loser. I mention all this because in a life not noted for supreme rationality, I am still particularly crazed when I lose something. It must be found! Immediately! Turn out the militia to hunt!
My relief when the couch cushion is turned over, the errant hammer pokes up from the grass where I left it, the wandering dog appears from the woods is immense. Not that my mother is around any more to offer praise.... Philip Larkin's comment on mums and dads is, for me, instructive here.
I had to look up the Philip Larkin, but of course he is correct.
I don't think of The Lost Comments as something I or any person lost. Tech losses seem different than losing objects. I can count on one hand how many things I've lost in my life, and I remember each one.
A beautiful, expensive, complicated sweater my mother knit for me, that I left on the back of a chair, eating dim sum in Chinatown. (My mother re-knit the same sweater a second time!) A few heartbreaking things like that. I almost lost a travel diary notebook in Amsterdam, but went back to the spot, and it was there. Does that count?
I do have a bad habit of walking around with something in my hand -- water bottle, notebook, phone, whatever -- then putting it down to do something, then walking away without it. I re-trace my steps to find whatever it is. But those things aren't lost. They're just not in my hand in the moment. :)
I lost my wallet at Venice Beach once--and it had car keys in it--and didn't discover the loss until I'd skated all the way back to Santa Monica. Without much hope, I skated back to the bench I'd sat on, where a Russian woman, spotting me, flipped back a bit of her skirt, revealing my wallet still in situ where it had sneaked out of my pocket. She refused a reward but accepted my babbling gratitude graciously.
I wish I could say an incident like that made me less of a misanthrope. And it did! (For as long as it took to get back into the LA traffic.)
I have several memories of that type from the other side. The one that comes to mind first is finding a bag on the road near Tulum in 1994 -- a light blue cordoruy shoulder bag. The bag contained a book by Mario Vargas Llosa and a big wad of American dollars, sunscreen, water bottle. And ID. It belonged to a very young Argentine woman. It was obviously a daypack that must have fallen off a bicycle. We had just had a very memorable day and this became part of it.
We asked around at some nearby places but didn't find her. (Although people did offer to take it and "give it to her when we see her". Uh, yeah.) I took the bag back to NYC with us, and used a small amount of her cash to mail it to Argentina in a big box, with a letter.
I didn't hear anything back, and stopped waiting to hear. Then one day, months later -- possibly a year or more -- I received a letter of thanks and apology. Her mother had shamed her into writing. :)
Hello! I've just come across your blog, and am enjoying it as a US expat who moved to Canada in 2016. I've been in IT for years as a programmer and sysadmin, and losing data like this also drives me crazy! So I have some suggestions for you that might help - just make a backup of the original export file before you try anything below.
First, Blogger might be producing invalid XML in its backup files, maybe due to a bug seen only in large exports. I assume that you don't see specific errors with the xml file when you try to import? If you haven't done this already, do a search for 'XML validator' and have one of the online validators show you where the errors are in the XML file. If you know where the error(s) are, you can fix them by manually editing the file and trying the import again.
XML is like HTML in that there will be opening and closing tags (like and , respectively) for both the file itself and each "entry" within the file (each post or comment), and they have to match - for each opening tag, there has to be a matching closing tag. Typically, invalid XML will have missing opening or closing tags, or too many closing tags for an entry.
To make finding errors easier, I suggest a using one of the simple programmer's text editors like notepad++ (that one is free), that will nicely highlight the XML tags and show you visually if there are tag mismatches.
The other thing you can try, if it is a problem with the size of your backup, is to break it into smaller parts. There will be a global xml header and footer - you can separate those out and in between, there will be an xml block for each post or comment, obviously repeated many times. You can run a test by creating a new XML file with just the header, footer and one post to see if it imports.
Just an example - I have an old backup file for a blogger blog I used to have, and I see it has a 3-line header (two lines that start ... opening and closing tags. Then the document footer is just the line with the closing tag, all the way at the bottom of the document. Knowing this basic bit about XML structure can help you edit it to fix problems, or to create smaller files for test imports.
The larger problem I see, as you have mentioned, is with comments - they each get their own entry, they are not directly attached to the post entries. In my export, I see that each comment has a line that starts '<thr:in-reply-to...' that contains the link to the post the comment is attached to. So if you are going to try and breakup the larger file into smaller files, you have to go through and find the matching comment entries for each post, and make sure they are in the same file together.
One final suggestion, if the posts haven't disappeared, you can try to create a smaller export file with just the post entries deleted, and try to import that.
Anyway, I hope this helps and you can get your comments back!
Doug, thank you so much!! This is super helpful!
I'm curious how you found wmtc. Also why you came to Canada, if you'd like to share.
No problem! I found wmtc through progressivebloggers.ca. I find myself in search of more leftist content after the election down south, and it seems to be not on the large social media or news sites, but on personal blogs like yours.
I moved to Canada from the US northeast in early 2016 with my family mostly due to healthcare. Even having what most would consider a decent job with benefits meant I was paying $700/month in insurance premiums out of my own paycheck for a "family plan", before any co-pays or deductibles. And then it was never certain that any given visit or procedure would be covered. And premiums went up 10-15% per year, without fail.
Even with the higher taxes in Quebec (where we first moved to), that savings meant we essentially broke even that first year, and my wife and I had a huge weight lifted from our shoulders that we no longer had to worry about someone in our immediate family getting seriously ill and bankrupting us.
We're now in New Brunswick, and don't regret moving at all, despite the challenges with Canadian healthcare post-COVID, overall it's been far better than what we had. There is a lot more to say on our Canadian journey, and I've been considering another blog to get it all out there, so maybe this will prompt me to actually do it :).
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