How to export a backup of your WordPress.com blog – when the email never arrives

Problem: For some of your WordPress.com hosted blogs, you are effectively unable to export a local backup copy of the blog.

You Export, and apparently you have success. The WordPress dashboard informs you that “Your export is being processed!” and that a link to the download will be emailed to you. But… nothing ever arrives in your email in-box.

This seems more likely to happen on larger blogs, with smaller ones tending to give you a direct .XML download of your blog.

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Solution: You are likely still using the older WordPress interface for posting. This is a very sensible option, as the new posting page is hideous and clunky. But it appears that the whole-blog Export option only works as intended with the ungainly newer Blue interface. To get there from the old WordPress interface:

i) Visit the daily stats page, which uses the new Blue interface.
ii) Then scroll down to the listing for the blog you want to export, and click on “Views”.
iii) Once there, click the Settings on the sidebar, and then scroll down the Settings page to find the Export option near the bottom.
iv) Start the Export. At the end of the Export process, you should get the message that “Your export was successful! A download link has also been sent to your email.” But this time you will also get a direct download link to a .ZIP file…

This .ZIP contains the compressed WordPress eXtended RSS file generated by WordPress. It contains your posts, pages, comments, categories, and links to the graphics (but not the blog’s graphics). In some cases the .ZIP may contain multiple .XML backups. In many cases the media export .ZIP will fail repeatedly. Despite WordPress claims of being ‘portable’ it really isn’t when it comes to the images.

On doing nation-specific Web search

In Autumn 2017 Google announced that Google Search would ignore the country domain of its service, and instead serve you national results based on what Google thinks your geographic location is…

“the choice of country service will no longer be indicated by domain. Instead, by default, you’ll be served the country service that corresponds to your location.”

Here’s my quickstart on some of the nation-specific research options which can route around this. You either need to:

i) use the likes of DuckDuckGo and add national URL Parameters to the end of your bookmarked URL: e.g. Hungary. Top results are not great in that instance, with BBC, Wikipedia and Guardian cruft, but they quickly become relevant as you scroll down. Adding site:hu helps a lot, at the cost of knocking out local grassroots blogs on WordPress and Hungarian .org and .com sites etc.

DuckDuckGo is now actually better than Google, in my opinion, for picture research. Though you will have to home-brew a Creative Commons filter within your search terms.

ii) Go to Google’s Advanced Search settings and (for now) you can request that Google Search “narrow your results” by nation. Clunky, but it may prove useful. I imagine there must be a browser plugin that allows this setting to be swiftly switched across various nations.

iii) use a VPN proxy in your Web browser. The Opera web browser has a free and sturdy VPN built in, but all you can do with it these days is to select broad regions rather than nations (as used to be the case). Adequate for things like quickly getting past region-blocking on public domain resources at Hathi, etc, but not that useful if you just want to research ceramics in Morocco.

iv) use a few free VPN such as Browsec. This offers three or four free national VPN nodes, of a limited access duration (10 minutes or so before it becomes unresponsive). Again, useful for researchers wanting to access region-locked Hathi books or YouTube videos etc. Such freebie VPNs also offer an enticingly big list of other national nodes for paid users…

v) The TOR browser. Google’s new move potentially leaves sensitive ‘business researcher traffic’ open to being snooped on and tracked by hostile/piratic nations, who may either clandestinely run and/or can tap into VPN traffic. As such, smaller business — especially those in a larger supply-chain but without security-savvy IT departments — might also look into the anonymous TOR browser’s capabilities before doing intensive country research. It’s my understanding that some TOR exit nodes can be geolocated to nations, while others appear to be free of geolocation, and apparently one can switch between these types and choose which nation the exit node is in.

So far as I’m aware, JURN has for some time now auto-detected your home nation and served results accordingly. Some types of user can route around this somewhat, by searching in a local alphabet and encasing words or phrases in quote marks (“مقارنة”) which in this case should mean the majority of search results are in Arabic.

Paperity is back

Paperity is back online, and has been added back into the JURN index.

BBC Weather: a chance of probabilities

The BBC Weather forecast page has changed. It’s slightly clunkier now, in terms of graphic elegance. Certainly a move away from the near-perfect design they had before. But there are new features, as trade-offs. Presumably the change is because the promised new supercomputers are now online, as so we get a nine-day default view rather than the previous five-day default view. They’ve also added a new unlabelled “Chance of precipitation” (meaning, rain) icon down the bottom just above the wind speed and direction…

To the 95% of the population who don’t understand probabilities, and are anyway not able to meaningfully apply them within the highly variable system that is the British weather, that new additional icon is probably unwanted. Also, why show a visual icon of rain when it’s not at all likely to happen? It’s a form of pessimistic “fake news”, done in the language of graphic design.

If you want to remove these “Chance of precipitation” icons, here’s how to do it in Firefox. I’m assuming you have AdblockPlus installed and its Element Hiding Helper add-on, which only work properly in FF55 or lower. In Adblock go to: Filter Preferences | Element Hiding Rules | Add filter. Add the following new rule…

bbc.co.uk##[class*="wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation--grey gel-brevier"]

This removes the grey “low” probability icons…

If you also want the blue “low-medium” probability icons gone, then add the following rule…

bbc.co.uk##[class*="wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation--blue gel-brevier"]

Even after this blocking, you can always click on an hour-slice and you get a slide-out which gives a more sensible type of “Chance of precipitation”…

The gradations here are far more simple: Low chance | Chance | High chance. That’s good enough for me, as I don’t need to be constantly juggling with fine percentage gradations of an hourly probability of rain. We’re a damp nation and the ever-changing weather in a specific locality is complicated enough as it is.

Here’s what the BBC Weather’s new nine-day hourly forecast looks like, after fixing…

Regular users will probably also want to block the new animated tickers, the huge and ugly new satellite map that loads under the bottom of the page, the hysterical “danger weather” warnings, and other page-junk, in order to speed up loading.

Added to JURN

Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics

Post-Christendom Studies

Akropolis : Journal of Hellenic Studies

“Utility of primary scientific literature to environmental managers”

“Utility of primary scientific literature to environmental managers: an international case study on coral-dominated marine protected areas” (preprint, Nov 2017)…

“To assess accessibility of MPA science to decision-makers we conducted a literature search using the database SCOPUS … limiting our search to all ‘articles’ and ‘reviews’ published between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2012. … only 43% of primary scientific articles and 50% of review papers relating to coral dominated MPAs [marine protected areas] were freely accessible to decision makers.”

Although keep in mind here that SCOPUS only has 29.18% coverage of the DOAJ Open Access titles, so is not likely to do well on many types of OA indexing test.

Parker Library On the Web

Parker Library On the Web. Now in version 2.0, online and public, and with new viewer and a “clearly articulated Creative Commons license”…

“The Parker Library boasts one of the most significant collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts written in Latin and Old English as well as impressive holdings in Middle English and Anglo-Norman literature. Open access to those manuscripts means greater opportunities for research and teaching.”

Jitsi Meet

Jitsi Meet.

“Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution that you can use all day, every day, for free — with no account needed.”

Open Source, too. At first it appears to be Android and iOS only, but scroll down and there’s a Windows desktop version on the list. I’m not sure if it scales, so that you can reliably use it for 30 or more people for a peak-time webinar. But it might be worth trying.

Limited Dimensions

Dimensions is a new academic search-engine owned by mega-publisher SpringerNature, whose press-release is today being picked up by the likes of Nature and The Bookseller.

Hook said: “Dimensions is not intended to be a bibliometric product, but rather a discovery product”. (The Bookseller, 15th Jan 2018)

It’s about discovery and it’s public, so I gave it a quick test:

  mongolian folk song (choosing the “full data” option).

Getting Dimensions to “Limit to” Open Access and reload results according, was a fiddly multi-click operation. But when this was done, none of the results were relevant. It even managed to surface an article touching on Du Bois (author of the 1903 book Souls of Black Folk), a highly spurious result known to me from previous group tests, and which appears to arise from some antiquated synonym algorithm that states “Mongolian = black”. The best Dimensions could do, in over 100 results, was the tangentially relevant paper “Translocal English in the linguascape of Mongolian popular music”, on the use of the English language in the music scene of post-socialist Mongolia. This article’s record page gave a valid link which eventually got me to the full article at Wiley.

I then removed their OA filter, which actually improved OA results! However the top results were then questionable. The top two results were relevant, but both were from the Canadian Center of Science and Education. The third result was also relevant, but from the Atlantis Press. Despite being OA, none of the sources for these three results are indexed by the DOAJ or JURN. As for JURN, they never will be. The Scholarly Kitchen suggests that Dimensions users may be finding more such results in their search…

“Dimensions is inclusive in terms of content coverage, rather than curated as is the case for Scopus and Web of Science. Of course, what reads to some as more inclusive can be seen by others as less rigorous selection…”

On both search types the results rapidly devolved into off-topic medical and a few natural-history items, although there was one relevant book review lurking in one set of ‘the first 100’ results, plus a possibly-relevant chapter. Sadly the review article was found to be on the ‘academia-only’ service Project Muse, and as such all but the first page was blocked to the public. The book chapter on “Tourism and culture in Mongolia” was perhaps at Elsevier, but on arrival Elsevier’s link gave the response that “Your request cannot be processed at this time”, presumably due to my lack of log-on credentials.

If Dimensions had been in my recent group-test based on these keywords, it would have been nowhere in the rankings, with a score of “1” for “Translocal English in the linguascape of Mongolian popular music”. And even then it’s a marginal result, and so I would have been being charitable to Dimensions.

New LIDAR 3D map of the UK

Aircraft equipped with laser scanners are making a new accurate 3D map of the UK, showing everything more than 3 feet wide…

“The new project, starting immediately and running through winter 2018, will cover all of England’s national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) such as the Peak District … the data is expected to be made available for free to the public and industry.”

Previous data sets have been public, and have helped uncover things like ancient Roman roads through the landscape — though were not so detailed or up-to-date as this one will be.