Advice on making a global change to my blog

• 

  trnovice · Member · May 17, 2009 at 7:19 pm

  • Copy link
  • Add topic to favorites

  Hi,

  I’d like some advice on making a change to all posts on my blog.

  The bottom of each post has a section with links to various bookmarking sites. For an example, scroll down to the bottom of the following link:

  http://peterthomas.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/using-multiple-business-intelligence-tools-in-an-implementation/

  What I wanted to do was to replace one of these links with an different bookmarking site, obviously the URL passed to these sites is different for each post. Having manually coded 90+ of these, then the prospect of manually editing them makes me feel rather queezy.

  Instead my idea was as follows:

  1. Export the blog to XML

  2. Do a global replace of the code for the old bookmark links with the code for the new ones (leaving the URLs in place) – obviously keeping an unchanged copy as a backup in case something goes wrong.

  3. Import the blog again

  Some questions:

  1. Would this work?

  2. Do I need to delete the blog (or just bits of it) before I reimport?

  3. What happens with images / other files if I do the above?

  4. Any other potential pitfalls that I should be aware of?

  5. Is there an alternative approach that I should consider instead?

  Thanks in advance.

  Peter

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

• 

  trnovice · Member · May 17, 2009 at 7:35 pm

  • Copy link

  I guess this is related to https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/importing-blog-2 – but this doesn’t seem to have been answered either.

  Peter

• 

  trnovice · Member · May 18, 2009 at 7:41 am

  • Copy link

  *cough*

• 

  raincoaster · Member · May 18, 2009 at 7:59 am

  • Copy link

  If a thread hasn’t been answered in several days, it’s probably because nobody knows the answer.

• 

  trnovice · Member · May 18, 2009 at 8:37 am

  • Copy link

  Surely *someone* must know the answer – maybe I should move the thread to Support.

  Thanks

  Peter

• 

  carocat · Member · May 18, 2009 at 9:49 am

  • Copy link

  Moving a thread doesn’t make a difference as we’re still the same people reading it!

  I have no answer, but reimporting your xml file and changing something to it raises red warning lights for me and I wouldn’t think that it’s good doing that.

  Do you really need that on all of your old posts?

• 

  trnovice · Member · May 18, 2009 at 11:35 am

  • Copy link

  Thanks for the reply, I agree and am beginning to think that it may not be worth the bother.

  Peter

• 

  sensuouscurmudgeon · Member · May 18, 2009 at 12:48 pm

  • Copy link

  If it’s any comfort, I faced the same kind of decision a couple of months ago. Raincoaster gave some good advice on adding social bookmarking buttons, customized with the title and URL for each post. That was here:
  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/automatic-social-bookmarking-for-posts?replies=13

  I’ve been doing that to new posts for the last six weeks, but it’s a chore, so what about the hundreds of older posts at my blog? I went back and added those buttons to a few of my oldie-goldie favorites, but I decided to ignore it for all the other old posts. No one will ever know the difference.

• 

  lorawow · Member · May 18, 2009 at 1:13 pm

  • Copy link

  Still no answer so why don’t you just contact the Support? I’m sure they can give you an answer:
  http://support.wordpress.com/support/

  – Lora