How to manually map a comment file to the original blog article at The Smallest Minority

Note: Individual comments in the XML export file are between <item></item> tag pairs.

  1. Scroll to the bottom of the comment file. This is the first comment made on the original article.

  2. Note the date and time in the <pubDate> tag for that comment. For example: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:13:06 +0000

  3. Go to the TSM page for that year and month. For example, http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/04

  4. The time in the exported comments is GMT. The times posted on the blog are in Arizona local time, which is 7 hours earlier. If the time on the comment is 07:00 or earlier, look for the day prior to the day on the comment. If the date on the comment is the first day of the month, you'll need to look on the blog page for the prior month.

    The time in the above example is before 07:00. Subtracting 7 hours gives 21:13 on the day before (12 Apr 2010).

  5. Find the day corresponding to the date in the comment (or the day prior, if the time is earlier than 07:00). You may need to step through more than one page of articles using the "Older Posts" link at the bottom if the day is early in the month.

    If there were multiple articles posted on that day, the correct article will have a time prior to the time on the comment minus seven hours. Any articles with a time after the comment time can (probably) be ignored.

  6. Review the text of the comment (between the <description></description> tags) to get an idea of the context of the comment. If you are lucky, it will contain a direct quote from one of the candidate articles, or a reference to the name of someone quoted in one of the candidate articles.

    You may have to review several comments to determine what the context is and which article best matches that context.

  7. When you are confident you have located the correct article, note the URL of it. For example: http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/04/we-were-warned.html

  8. Go back to the beginning of the comments file and locate the <jskit:attribute key="md5path" value="...."> tag. Copy the string from the value="..." attribute. For example: b716eeb30041602fb100f520f2e79e29

  9. Send the md5path and the URL to me (jhardin@impsec.org) and I will add it to the comment/article mapping file.

Thank you for your assistance!