2020 Blog Archive
Last Year I used BlogBooker to archive my Dreamwidth blog to PDF. This year, all I needed to do was add a file for 2020. I had made screenshots, so I knew exactly what settings to use.
I launched BlogBooker, and it almost immediately reported invalid credentials for logging into Dreamwidth. I did retries and then some other things like changing my Dreamwidth password to something less complex and logging out of Dreamwidth. Nothing worked. So I opened a support chat window and reported my problem.
A support person responded almost immediately. It may have helped that I have the Premier plan, which includes high-priority support. In a few moments he reported that six months ago Dreamwidth changed access to require an API key instead of a password. I didn’t have an API key, but the support person gave me instructions on how to get one created in my Dreamwidth account. And I followed the instructions to get an API key, which I copied to the clipboard and fed to BlogBooker.
It still didn’t work. I reported the problem in support chat, and the support person did some checking. They reported that the API key I was entering was 1 character too long. I didn’t see any problem with the selection I copied. But I opened a text editor, pasted the clipboard into an empty doc, selected the key, and copied to the clipboard again. I fed the Key to BlogBooker, and this time the app worked.
It took about 17 minutes to create the PDF. The PDF is 1194 pages encompassing 351 entries with 1021 images. The file is 315 MB. Last year’s file is 130 MB. I suspect the difference is that this year I embedded larger images in my blog, even though the HTML scaled the display image to the same size as usual. I certainly don’t mind having higher resolution images in my blog archive.
Anyway... one more annual task is completed.
You're welcome to comment on LJ, but I'd rather you leave a comment on the original post at Dreamwidth. The current comment count is
.
I launched BlogBooker, and it almost immediately reported invalid credentials for logging into Dreamwidth. I did retries and then some other things like changing my Dreamwidth password to something less complex and logging out of Dreamwidth. Nothing worked. So I opened a support chat window and reported my problem.
A support person responded almost immediately. It may have helped that I have the Premier plan, which includes high-priority support. In a few moments he reported that six months ago Dreamwidth changed access to require an API key instead of a password. I didn’t have an API key, but the support person gave me instructions on how to get one created in my Dreamwidth account. And I followed the instructions to get an API key, which I copied to the clipboard and fed to BlogBooker.
It still didn’t work. I reported the problem in support chat, and the support person did some checking. They reported that the API key I was entering was 1 character too long. I didn’t see any problem with the selection I copied. But I opened a text editor, pasted the clipboard into an empty doc, selected the key, and copied to the clipboard again. I fed the Key to BlogBooker, and this time the app worked.
It took about 17 minutes to create the PDF. The PDF is 1194 pages encompassing 351 entries with 1021 images. The file is 315 MB. Last year’s file is 130 MB. I suspect the difference is that this year I embedded larger images in my blog, even though the HTML scaled the display image to the same size as usual. I certainly don’t mind having higher resolution images in my blog archive.
Anyway... one more annual task is completed.
You're welcome to comment on LJ, but I'd rather you leave a comment on the original post at Dreamwidth. The current comment count is
.