As of January 5th, I have written 269,558 words in this journal. This equates to 40 straight hours of typing at 110WPM, or 696 pages in Microsoft Word (12-point font, single spaced, Times New Roman). I feel horrible for all those wasted electrons as they are used to support this drivel.

I spent most of today hammering out the backup feature. The problem with the previous version's was that it didn't factor in the longevity of accounts (perhaps I subconsciously thought that Tabulas wouldn't last, who knows). So with accounts like mine (900+ entries), creating one huge backup file was a very big mistake.

The new version partitions your entries into groups of 50 entries each; it creates a separate file for every 50 entries. It then zips up the files and stores the zip file on your personal data storage so you can download it.

Gone are the RSS formats for backups; there is no real set standard for archiving large amounts of posts for transition between journaling services (partially because true support for total exporting is severely lacking on all sites). I have used a simple HTML file and will probably add support for some sort of XML format in the future, but any developer should be able to parse the entry HTML file without a big problem for the time being.

Some things I'd like to do in the future for this feature:

• Better templated support for each entry; each entry is placed on a page haphazardly and there is no moving between. Perhaps I can add in a HTML file that serves as an index file; this can be a frame or something that links up to all the backup pages.
• Automated backups. Paid users should be able to set a threshold of time where backups are created and e-mailed to an e-mail account automagically.
• And as I mentioned before, some sort of XML format (maybe RSS *is* best here) or something. Maybe it'd be more preferable just to use a random XML that allows for storage of all the metadata (book of the moment, etc. This data is actually currently not stored in the raw HTML versions ... yet).
• I'd really like to do gallery backups as well.

Forr those of you on the new Tabulas CP, you can try out the 'backup' feature to see it at work from the control panel.

. . .

Oh yeah, to the person who suggested rollovers for the CP tabs ... thanks. I finally got around to doing that and they are TOTALLY 100% BETTER!

. . .

You also notice how the add entry page automatically selects the title screen? Coolness. Because of that javascript, I couldn't implement the Javascript Standards-Compliant Image Rollover script ... there was some issue where the onLoad attribute in the body was overriding the script. Boo. I really liked that script, too.