Don't Copy and Paste Articles From Reader View

1. 62

   eugbugposted 5 weeks ago

   Although reader view strips ads and other clutter from the HTML, it drags in other unwanted stuff. I noticed that there were Saymedia references in the HTML for an article that I had migrated from Discover to Blogger. I had copied and pasted the whole article, rather than saving images individually and then reinserting them. It turned out that the pasted images are being loaded from TAG's Saymedia server, rather than being actually stored on Google's GoogleUserContent.com domain.
   Lucky I spotted this before they're deleted.

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      bravewarriorposted 5 weeks agoin reply to this

      Copy/paste from Author view works just fine. Why would you copy/paste from reader view, Eugene? Those sites are going down soon. Author view is the original version without all the ads and TAG intrusions. I had all of mine imported to Authory.com. All but two came through successfully. But I was able to manually import them. For any text, photos, videos that didn't make it through, I copy/pasted them from Author view. That worked.

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         Kenna McHughposted 5 weeks agoin reply to this

         Same here, I copied and pasted from Author View, and it worked. Though the content links to Amazon prevented the smooth transition, I still managed.

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      2. 62

         eugbugposted 5 weeks agoin reply to this

         That's what I used to do, but I thought Reader view produced an even cleaner source. In future I'll save images to my desktop and copy from there and also copy text and paste it as unformatted text using the the right button context menu on my mouse. Another issue is that author view doesn't preserve captions on images.
         A way to check whether images are being loaded from Saymedia is to save your article, go offline and then try to view the saved version. If you only see the text, (which is saved locally), but no images, then that means images are only implemented as links to the server.

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         1. 89

            bravewarriorposted 5 weeks agoin reply to this

            You're right about captions and attributions not coming through, Eugene. I copy/pasted them from Author view after copy/pasting the images that didn't transfer. That worked.

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2. 78

   Brenda Arledgeposted 5 weeks ago

   oh well...I've been busy copying and I've already copied over 500.  I haven't been using author view, but the images are not as important as my writing.  As long as I have my own words saved, I will be happy.

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3. 62

   eugbugposted 3 weeks ago

   I'm doing this the long way by copying and pasting to Notepad. It's the only safe way without dragging in TAG code. Unfortunately, when copying and pasting from Notepad to Blogger, content is inserted as one large chunk, enclosed by HTML <p> tags. This causes other problems such as the page scrolling to the end every time the enter key is hit or an image is inserted between lines of text. It takes me a whole day to build an article, so should take half a year to transfer everything at this rate.

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      theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

      Deleted
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         theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

         Ugh, I couldn't be bothered with all that. I just copied (not ctrl A) in Author View and pasted into Obsidian (free). It is saved as a local markdown file and easy to copy onto another platform. Brings all the images, comments and questions with it.
         
         They do require minor tidying when republishing but nothing major.
         
         

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         1. 62

            eugbugposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

            Have you inspected the HTML in your browser to ensure unwanted code isn't being imported? And did you copy and paste images manually? If the entire content is pasted from Reader View in Author View, only image URL references are pasted, not the actual images. So they load off TAG's Saymedia server.

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            1. 60

               theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

               It's markdown, so is basic text in a text editor. Photos brought over automatically in Author View as is, not Reader View.
               
               https://obsidian.md/
               
               I have saved in Reader View to another app, so I have two copies of each article. From that app I can reproduce them as PDFs if necessary. All images preserved. It's possible that those will disappear, I suppose. Most are CC so not too important to me.

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               1. 62

                  eugbugposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

                  Text editors such as Notepad strip out HTML tags. Pasting directly to e.g. Blogger without going through Notepad drags in a lot of HTML clutter from the source website if either Author View or Reader View are being used. I'm working on a method at the moment to just retain basic tags like <h2>, <h3> etc.  If you right click on Windows or do similar on Mac and open your images in a new tab, it'll show you where they're being sourced from.

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                     theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

                     Yes, I see now. Saymedia. I'll have to replace them before I reuse them. Most are already saved in folders. Thanks for pointing that out.
                     
                     While I was messing around on the Obsidian knowledge base, I saw that you can publish to the Web and use your own domain. Looking into it now.

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                        eugbugposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

                        I'm glad I noticed the image thing before I migrate. I've got hundreds of them to paste. They're all saved in backups, but it's easier to paste from Hubpages's Discover. Firefox have rolled out a new split screen feature that allows two tabs to appear simultaneously on screen. One of those fancy ultra-wide monitors would be useful for copying and pasting.

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                           theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

                           I use my 12" tablet as a second monitor to my laptop. Well, I used to. Don't really need to anymore.
                           
                           Also after looking at Obsidian Publish, I decided not to go ahead as it's far too complicated for me. I have given up on complication

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                     2. 62

                        eugbugposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

                        I'm trying to figure out from the markup whether the Saymedia images are the zoomed version of the ones in a page proper, that can be loaded in a new tab on right clicking. In any case, it's not good to have a reference to Saymedia in the markup.

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4. 62

   eugbugposted 2 weeks ago

   A tip for anyone who's copied and pasted from Author View: Markup <div> tags with ids enclose blocks of text, lists, images etc. So if you want, you can implement a TOC like we used to be able to do. So for instance, this is a subtitle (given a h2 tag), followed by an un-numbered list:
   
   <div id="mod_48342728"><h2>What are Examples of Things That Need Positive Buoyancy?</h2><div id="txtd_48342728"><ul><li>Lifebelts (lifebuoys)</li>
   <li>Marking and meteorological buoys</li>
   <li>Ships</li>
   <li>Swimmers</li>
   <li>Life jackets</li>
   <li>Floats on fishing lines</li>
   <li>Floats in toilet cisterns and float switches</li>
   <li>Flotation tanks/bags for recovering lost cargo/archaeological artefacts/submerged vessels</li>
   <li>Floating oil rigs and wind turbines</li>
   </ul></div>
   </div>

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      bravewarriorposted 2 weeks agoin reply to this

      That's quite complicated, Eugene. I'm not a programmer/coder, so I would never attempt - or even know to - what you illustrate above.

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         eugbugposted 2 weeks agoin reply to this

         There was a "How To" guide on Hubpages. I think Glenn Stock wrote it. Not sure if it's still around or he's migrated it somewhere, but it's fairly simple to implement the steps involved in building a TOC if you can edit the HTML for articles on whatever site you've moved content to. I can only do basic stuff in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and like any computer language or spoken language, one needs to be using it regularly to remember the syntax and vocabulary. I'm not going to be doing that professionally, so ChatGPT is a good mentor and slave at the moment, explaining how blocks of code work and writing code for me.

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