Yes, as I suggested, this is just a beginning, but IMO a more satisfactory one than with BlogBackUpOnLine. The idea was to see how far you can get without hacking the code: extending the given functionality of the plugin to pull in comments too, and marry them up to the post, is probably not rocket surgery. Maybe it does that already, I’ll check!

As for look-and-feel… I still remember a certain gentleman, at Erpanet in Urbino, asking: “What if I suggested preserving look-and-feel was a load of dingo’s kidneys?” Or words to that effect.

Perhaps some kind of tiered system for classifying web archives would be useful, a la WCAG: e.g. Level 1 preserves information content, Level 2 preserves info+functionality, Level 3 preserves the info+fn+look-and-feel. Then organisations can define their objectives from the outset and not get sidetracked or scope-creep…

interesting post! Feedwordpress sounds like a very useful tool, particularly for institutions that want a central ‘repository’ of blog postings. I’ve seen it employed on other blogs and wondered how it was done.

I’d probably refer to this kind of an approach as an archive of blog posts than a blog archive - a subtle difference, but it result in quite a different end product, I think? A blog is more than just a collection of posts: it’s a platform for interaction and exchange of ideas with the community. Comments are usually enabled and the comments can become an important part of the blog, even enriching posts and expanding on ideas in the original post. Thought goes into the design and appearance of the blog. Links and widgets provide wider context. All these things make a blog more than just a series of articles, so for the sake of integrity I’d probably argue for a wider capture than the one described above. Though that said, you can probably set it to capture comments as RSS feeds… so what this really comes back to is clarity of requirements for preservation, or establishing exactly what it is you want to preserve and what it is necessary to preserve to ensure the integrity of your target is maintained and it can be re-used as per your re-use requirements.

Collecting just the posts is useful, but it restricts re-use of the archive - eg, it would be difficult to use it to illustrate how you as an institution engage with the community if you don’t keep your comments. However, I do agree that this is a useful and ‘low-cost, quick-start approach to securing data in The Cloud, and safeguarding the corporate memory.’ After all, institutions that want to do this will have to start somewhere and it’s better they capture the posts than capture nothing at all. It will be interesting to see how this particular plug-in develops further.

Maureen.

PS - What’s a blog farm? Is it like a worm farm - but with less squirming?!