Thursday, July 03, 2008

Back ups of this blog

Here is the path today. I was feeling guilty that I am not reading enough because I am borrowing about 40 books and instead of reading these I am cerfing the Internet. So I started to read some more of the O'Reilly book on PHP and MySQL. I read about MySQL and there is an example of SQL code for adding a book to a database. I get distracted and thought about making a database of all the books I have ever read. I then figured I could grab some books from my studies blog. I of course have to have all the posts to search. I then figured it is time to back up these blogger blogs. So I started with this one which is now five years old. I looked in my directories and found I have about two years of posts not copied and pasted into word processor files. So I have now copied all those approximately 24 months and now every month is copied and pasted from the web into a Microsoft word doc file.

Now I must to do the same for my studies and more studies blog then I can figure a way of scanning it for bibliographic cites. I typically used the McGill legal studies style for my citations. I have many choices now. I can do what the book recommends and use MySQL which is installed on my Macbook and on my Linux computer. I could also install MySQL on this eMac. Or it may in fact already be installed here. I could also use RefWorks but that depends on being a registered student at the university of Ottawa. I could use BibDesk and need to install that on this eMac. I could make a plain text file of the data or use Excel meaning use some tool not especially for books. I could also use Librarything.com. Some of these book specific tools will be able to share the files. So the only problem now is to back up the studies and more studies blog and then extract the citations. From there I will go to RefWorks then download for BibTex and then manually up load to librarything. Also I could use Refworks "Grab it" and may be capture the books right off the blog pages. I may try that now. I am also thinking now before I leap that I should keep a separate list of books that have appeared on my blog only. Once again by writing I have helped solve some problems.

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