Springcleaning & Housekeeping

It's a bright and shiny Saturday morning so a good time to do some long-overdue admin.

First, change the password. What with the Thanet bloggy world getting a bit twitchy this week, it's a reminder that it's good practice to change your password every now and again, especially if you ever use publicly accessible machines in internet cafes or at work. And ALWAYS get a few numbers in there among the letters.

Second, back up your work! The loss of ECR's blog isn't just depriving us (temporarily I hope) of pithy comment and opinion - he had a lot of great pictures and insightful comments on there among all the other stuff. Although Blogger itself isn't terribly simple to back up (it involves making a new tamplate, saving the old one, replacing then exporting then replacing again and republishing - something like that anayway, I'd lost the will to live after reading through the instructions), there is a really nice and easy way to do it - it took me less than 5 minutes to back up my blog this morning.

Here's how: use a Firefox extension (what old-timers would call a plug-in) called Scrapbook. Instructions are all on the helpful Dummies Guide to Blogger where the download links for Firefox and then Scrapbook are in the third paragraph in the left hand column. I hardly ever use Firefox, but it's worth installing just for the occasional clever tool like this - each Month of your blog is saved with one simple drag-and-drop to the Scrapbook folder, and it's lightning fast.

I feel much happier now. Just off to change my password. Back soon...