How to Protect Your WordPress Blog From Being Hacked

How to Protect Your WordPress Blog From Being Hacked

By 365daysmasti   January 06, 2016   No comments:

Plugins are one of the main attracting core to wordpress rather than Blogger.. It makes job easy for you..

I recommend Wordfence plugin for your safety. Here are some of its features.

*. Scans your core files against a reference copy which you maintain in your cloud servers.
*. Lets you see what has changed, how the file has changed and even repair it.
*. Scans your comments, posts and all files including core, themes, plugins and everything else under your WordPress root directory for malware, virus signatures, vulnerabilities

 and (very importantly) URL’s that are known to host malware or viruses.
*. Wordfence keeps known dangerous URL’s, including ALL URL’s that are on Googles’ safe browsing list, out of your comments, pages, posts and files. This is by far my favorite feature because it’s virtually gauranteed to keep you off the dreaded red-page-of-death-malware-listthat Chrome and Google use to ban sites.
*. Wordfence comes with a complete firewall that lets youset up rules based on the type of traffic and either throttle orblock offenders with an SEO safe 503 (come back later) HTTP message.
*. Another favorite feature of mine is that you can block fake Google crawlers. I actually added this after I tested Wordfence on this site because I couldn’t believe how many scrapers were pretending to be Googlebot. So now they are all instantly blocked.
*. Wordfence uses Google’s recommended reverse-forward DNS verification to sift the fake Googlebots from the real ones.
*. It includes login security against every form of brute force attack out there including abusing your lost-password form.
*. And what’s the point of having all this awesome security if you can’t see who is visiting, who’s getting blocked and what humans and robots are doing? So Wordfence includes real-time traffic that wait..for…it…
*. …Includes crawlers, scrapers, robots and all non-human traffic. Something you can’t get from Google Analytics or any other Javascript based analytics package.
*. I’ve even broken out Googlebot, other crawlers, 404 errors, humans and there’s an All Hits view.
*. And of course it includes commercial grade city-level geolocation which is another feature that comes from our cloud servers.
*. Wordfence is also built using much of the knowledge I’ve gained building Feedjit’s real-time analytics so it is careful to minimize any impact on network, website and mysql database performance and keep your website running super-fast..

Always stay upgraded to latest versions. Also don’t forget to Upgrade all your themes and plugins to their newest versions as well.

- Never use your username as“Admin / admin / user/ your name etc..” and passwords as “12345 / admin123/

Password must be from 8 – 16char + digit + special symbols , you can use various online sites for creating strict passwords..

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Free Money from Rewards Sites

Free Money from Rewards Sites

By 365daysmasti   December 29, 2015   No comments:

Free Money from Rewards Sites

1. InboxDollars – $5

InboxDollars is one of my favorite sites for making easy money. It’s an online rewards site where you get paid to take surveys, shop online, watch videos, complete free offers, you even get paid to read your emails.

Right now they are giving a $5 sign up bonus for anyone joining the site.

2. SwagBucks – $5

Swagbucks is perhaps the best known online loyalty program out there, and the famous site that pays you for searching.

They also give you a $5 free sign up bonus to get you started.

3. CreationRewards – $5

CreationRewards is another similar reward site that rewards you for everything from shopping online to playing games, taking surveys, watching videos and more. Earn 5000 points within 60 days of registering and you get a $5 bonus added to your account. You can cash out via PayPal, Amazon Gift Cards, as well as gift cards from a variety of online and offline stores.

4. iPoll.com – $5

Do you have something to say about the products and services on the market? iPoll will pay you for your to say your piece. New members get to enjoy a five dollars sign-up bonus here.

5. SendEarnings – $5.00

You may be aware that there are a lot of businesses that don’t mind paying participants who are willing to undertake surveys commissioned, product testings and sometimes simply reading advertisers e-mails. The problem is these activities are channeled through intermediaries and quite a fair number of them are actually scammers.

The good news is that SendEarnings does not belong to this category. There is no joining fee here. Instead, they reward you with a five-dollar bonus for willing to become their new member. Over at SE, the threshold for cash out is $30 and the payout is going to be made in checks.

I was asked if I want to be in the distribution list of AMF Bowling’s newsletters. It took me 15 seconds to register my consent and I got $0.50 in return.

On another occasion, I registered a new account at Turbotax.com and they rewarded me with $3.50.

My point is that there are loads of them and it doesn’t take effort (or much time) to participate in these programs.

6. CashCrate.com – $1

CashCrate is arguably one of the most popular GPT (Get Paid To) sites. The site presents a multitude OF offers and you get paid for completing them. There is also a $1 bonus now for new registration.

7. FusionCash – $5

FusionCash gives you cash as you go shopping. There is no upfront fee but a five-dollar bonus when you sign up. Sometimes they offer cash incentives if you agree to participate in various offers (both free and paid).

8. VIP Voice (formal NPD) – Chance to win $1,000!

VIP Voice is a survey site with a spin. There is no sign up fee but no free bonus either. Instead, you will be entered into a draw straight after your registration. The signing up takes just seconds and you stand a chance to win $1,000!

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How to keep your Google Friend Connect followers when moving from Blogger to WordPress

How to keep your Google Friend Connect followers when moving from Blogger to WordPress

By 365daysmasti   December 28, 2015   No comments:

Step One: Cut a hole in the box.
Step Two: Put your…
Oh wait! That was the tutorial I wrote for Justin Timberlake…
Ok for real now!
1. Go here: http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ and sign in.
1a. If you have multiple sites listed, make sure you select from the one that has the GFC that you want to move to WP.
2. Click on Gadgets
3. Find Members and click Get This Gadget
4. Scroll down and click Generate Code
5. On the fourth line from the bottom, there is a code that looks like this:

{ id: ‘div-99999999999999999999’,

6. Copy that 20 digit number and paste it into notepad or something so you’ll have it for later.
7. On your WordPress Plugin page, install the plugin called Google Friend Connect Integration.  (Hint: If you put ‘google friend connect integration’ into the search term box, it’s the first one that pops up.)

Click ‘Install Now’ and then be sure to activate the plugin.
8. Under settings, you should see GFC Integration listed now. Click it.

9. Take the 20 digit code from before and paste it in the Friend Connect SiteId: box.  I chose to ignore everything else.   Click ‘Update Options’.

10. Go to your widgets page. Select GFC Members and slide it over to your sidebar.

From there you can customize the sizing and colors. The only thing I’ve changed on this site is the height- I made it 125 instead of the default 200

And that’s it!

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How to receive Comment Notifications in Blogger - Get1deal

How to receive Comment Notifications in Blogger - Get1deal

By 365daysmasti   December 28, 2015   No comments:

Here is the steps to How to receive Comment Notifications in Blogger:

Are you receiving comment notifications on your email address?  By default, comment notifications are turned off, so you don’t receive any emails whenever someone leaves a comment on your website. Blogger has a built-in feature that allows you to either turn on or off the notifications anytime that you like.  In this article, we will show you how to enable comment notifications in Blogger?

Login to your Blogger Dashboard. Select the blog on which you want to enable comment notifications, go to: Settings » Mobile and Email. Insert the email address in the text box present next to the “Comment Notification Email”. You can enter up to ten email addresses, separated by commas. Blogger will email these addresses when someone leaves a comment on your blog.

After you finish entering the email address, press the orange “Save setting” button present at the top right corner of your screen. Now whenever anyone would leave a comment on your site you will automatically receive notifications on your allocated email addresses.

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How to set the URL for Blogger posts

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

By 365daysmasti   December 27, 2015   No comments:

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

• yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg http://get1deal.blogspot.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg http://get1deal.blogspot.com)
• yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Earlier in its life, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1  Edit the post in the usual way.

2  In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3   Click on Links to show the options in it.

4   Click the custom URL radio button

5   Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6   Click Done.

7   Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions

The only characters you can use are:

• lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
• uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
• digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
• underscore (ie _)
• dash (ie - )
• full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL.  For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)


If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages:  the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully.   (Ref:  the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL  if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

• the URL is  http://get1deal.blogspot.in/2015/12/how-to-set-url-for-blogger-posts.html
• the post-title is now:  Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

Originally, after you hit the Publish button for the first time, there was no way change the permalink:  if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.


However you can now:

• Edit the post.
• Click the Revert to draft button.
• Edit the post URL in the same way

and the URL of your post will be changed.  Note that if you do this, the post characteristics (view count, comments) are kept.   This means that Blogger must be associating them with the unchanged internal post-identifier, not the URL.

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Blogspot - Labels to categorize your Blog Posts

Blogspot - Labels to categorize your Blog Posts

By 365daysmasti   December 27, 2015   No comments:

Why categorise your Posts

Grouping your blog's contents makes it easier for people who have reached your blog via Search to find other posts that they may be interested in - provided you add tools to your blog that let them navigate using labels.

It's essential if you want to make it look like you have put your Posts into Pages.

And it helps you to find posts yourself.

 Blogger's tools for working with categories

The only tool that Blogger provides for categorising or grouping Posts is Labels.

In short, Labels are tags that you apply to posts.

Each post can have as many Labels as you want (there is an upper limit of 5000 labels-per-blog, but most people don't get near it).

And you can use labels for different purposes.  For example, a post titled "Photographing Long-haired Black Cats" could have three different labels

• Cats - the the animal it's about
• Photography - for the functional category
• Jane Smith - for the author

The Labels gadget lets readers choose which groups of posts to see:  when a visitor clicks an item on the labels gadget, they are shown a list of posts that have the selected label applied to them.

You can add the Labels gadget as many times as you like, selecting which specific label values to show each time.   In the example above, you might add it three times, once for ainmals (showing Cats, Dogs and Rabbits), once for function (showing feeding, grooming and photography), and once for author (showing Jane Smith and Joe Bloggs).

There are three steps that you need to follow to make effective use of Labels in Blogger.

 How to add Labels to your blog

Step 1:    Label your Posts

For each post, add one or more labels.  You can add labels either:

• In the post-editor, in the Labels section at the right side of the post-editor o

• From the Posts tab, tick the posts you want to put the labels on, and then use the drop down arrow from the top icon that looks like a small luggage-tag:   choose the label or "New label ...").

Step 2:    Add the labels gadget

Add the Labels gadget to your blog - the same way you would add any other gadget .   You can add it as many times as you need, choosing which labels to show each time.
 
Warning:  If you choose to show only a certain selection of Labels in a gadget, then this is all that it will show even if you add new labels to your posts later on.  However if you don't restrict which labels are shown, then new ones are automatically shown in the gadget if they are associated with published posts.

Drag-and-drop the labels gadget to wherever you want it:  some people put it just underneath their header, to make readers think they've looking at a more traditional web-page.

Step 3:   Add Labels navigation

Another way for your readers access labels is from the display in the post header or footer of the list of labels assigned to each post.

This is turned on by default in most templates:  you can change the setting and move it around using post-templete settings found under  Layout > Blog Posts (edit).


What your visitors see

A List of Posts:

If a visitor to your blog clicks on an item in the labels gadget or in the labels-list that is show for apost, then the "labels-view screen" is used to show them the posts that have the selected label.

This screen is like the main screen: is only shows a certain number of posts and visitors need to use the newer-posts and older-posts links to move back through the list.

Like the main screen, if you have used jump-breaks in your posts, then the list only shows the first part of each post.  If you haven't used jump-breaks, then the whole posts are shown.

A summary message:

Unlike the main screen, in most templates there is a message at the top of the page saying:
"Showing newest posts with label WHAT-EVER-YOU-CHOSE. Show older posts"

Or if there are no published posts with the selected Label, the message is slightly different.  Some people change their template to customise or remove this message:  Chuck in The Real Blogger Status has written an excellent description of  how to do this.

What Labels aren't - but appear to be

Many people think that Labels are a way of actually putting Posts into pages.  However the Posts aren't actually moved around.  The labels-screen is just a way of viewing a smaller-than-usual group of Posts, and can make it look like you have put your posts into sub-pages.

Making multi-level categories

Currently, Blogger only supports one level of grouping.  The only way you can make sub-groups of Labels is to add two categories to each post - one for the "major" category, and one for the "minor" category

For example you might use labels like these

Major category:	Minor categories:
Recipes:	Sweet, Savory, Wheat-free
Party-games:	ice-breaker, run-around, silent, outdoor
Music:	lively, soft & gentle, traditional, instrumental

Each post would need to have at least one label from the major category, and one from the minor categories.

If you do this, you need to be clever about adding two levels of gadget, with only a selected group of labels shown in each gadget.   You might even need to edit your template, to only show certain gadgets in certain situations.

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Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog

By 365daysmasti   December 25, 2015   No comments:

Overview

Previously, I've described how to hide the Subscribe to Posts (atom) link that appears that the bottom of the screen on all Blogger's standard templates.

This is a sensible thing to do, because the link:

• is ugly, 
• is hard to find (except for hardened Blogger users who know what they're looking for), and 
• uses words ("atom") that don't mean much to many readers, especially ones who don't use Blogger.

But providing an RSS feed for your blog is A Very Good Thing to do, and there are many ways of doing it which don't involve that link.


Why is an RSS feed a good thing?

When websites were invented, people found that it took a lot of time to visit all their favourite sites regularly just to check for any changes.   It was frustrating for sites that don't change often.  It was hard to spot changes in big sites.   And web-site owners realised that some people simply wouldn't remember to check back anyway.

A few approaches were created to solve this problem.  One is RSS ("really simple syndication"), which is based on the idea that

• Websites are set up so that every time they are updated, they "publish a feed" of what's new, and
• People who are interested in websites use "feed reader" software to check if the sites they are interested in have new material, and
• Feed aggregator tools sit in the middle and keep track of what websites have published and what sites individual people are interested in what updates they have read so far.

Blogs that are made with Blogger are really just another type of website, so to work with RSS they needed a way to "publish a feed" of new material when posts are added.

The approach that Google originally used for Blogger involves "Atom" format.  The "Subscribe to Posts (atom)" link that appears on the bottom of most Layout and Designer templates is saying

 "Here's a link for your feed-reader to use, in our Atom format".

This works, but as I've said, it's ugly and not so obvious for non-Blogger-users.  The rules used to publish feeds on the internet have developed over time and different ways of organising the data in "feeds" (eg Atom 2.0, XML) have been adopted.  And website publishers have begun to look for more features in their feeds and in the statistics they get about who reads them.

Blogger also has a a Subscription-links gadget, which has buttons to let users subscribe to either your Posts or your Comments.  Recently I've had difficulty with this gadget:   I can add it, but it doesn't actually show up on my blog.   I've reported this via the Something-is-broken section of Blogger Help Forum, but not found a solution.

---

A better alternative is to use a tool like Feedburner.

---

This takes your blog's "raw" feed and delivers it to subscribers in the format your specify - and also offers a number of other features including tools to

• Promote your feed (the small orange radar bar / chicklet, socialization via Twitter, social-networking links in the feed-reader)
• Monetize it, by showing AdSense ads in feed items
• Offer and manage an email subscription to it
• Get statistics about the number of subscribers,

and many more.

Other alternatives?

There are other products that can be used to do similar things.

But Feedburner was purchased by Googe in 2007 (according to Wikipedia), so it's now part of the Google family of products.   Until I find some feature that I need but it doesn't have, I'm not likely to explore other tools, simply because it's often easier to use products from the same toolset.  

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Trick to Remove the numbers in blogger post URLs

Trick to Remove the numbers in blogger post URLs

By 365daysmasti   December 24, 2015   No comments:

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink. 

A common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts published in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available to remove the year and month numbers?

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date.  But remember that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages, and that remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option: is to accept that this is how Blogger worksand that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs in order to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits and keep the same words and month/year.  The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, one option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date or customized-URL-words(don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!)   Or you could just set it back to draft status, and then publish it again with different and this time unique customized-URL-words.

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like
www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

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How To Import Posts & Pages from one blog to another

How To Import Posts & Pages from one blog to another

By 365daysmasti   December 24, 2015   No comments:

To copy all the Posts from one blog to another, you need to export them from the first blog, and import the file that was created into the second file.

Any Pages (see The Difference between Posts and Pages) in the first blog, need to be moved individually, because pages aren't currently included in the export file.

If you want to totally replace the contents of the destination blog with the contents of the source blog, then you should delete the existing posts from the destination blog before you import the file.  (NB   Delete posts by going to the Posting / Edit Posts screen, and pressing the Delete button that is beside the post.   Don't delete the entire blog, or you will lose access to the URL).

 Follow these steps to copy all posts from one blog to another

1  Log in to Blogger.

2  Go to the export tab from the  Settings / Other tab.

3  Click on Export Blog.

3a  If you are using the new interface, click Download Blog on the confirmation message window:

4  Your computer will download a file.   For Windows users, it will probably be put in the My Documents / Downloads file.  Or you system may use another place, or it may ask you where to put it.   Whatever happens, you will need to know where this file is saved to.

5  Open the blog that you want to move the posts to
(You may need to log out and in again, or perhaps just switch to different browser or tab)

5  Delete (using Posting / Edit Posts) any Posts that are already there, but which you don't want in the refreshed blog.

6  Go to Settings > Other and click Import Blog.  When the box opens, choose the exported file that you made earlier, and enter the security-text.

7  Choose whether or not to automatically publish all imported posts.  
Only tick the box if you DO want the posts automatically imported.   If you don't tick it, the posts will be loaded, but with have status of Draft, so won't be visible by readers until you publish them.

8  Click Import Blog.

9  Check that the import worked successfully, by looking at the blog, and also at the list of posts under Edit Posts:  are the right number of posts there, do they have the right labels etc.

 Results

All the posts from the source blog will be copied to the destination blog.

Many of the post characteristics will be the same as in the original blog.  This includes:

• title
• post contents
• published-date and time
• label(s)
• post-author.

Any comments from the source blog will also be copied over - sometimes it takes a few hours for the links for them to be re-establshed properly.

The URL for each post will be based on the URL of the blog you have imported them into and the publication-date that the posts had in the source blog - for example:

www.YourNewBlogName.blogspot.com /2009/05/name-based-on-post-title.html

Any internal links in the blog will still point to the post in the old blog

For example this link points to a popular article in Blogger-HAT.  

If I export-and-imported this post into a new blog, the link would still point to the same place, ie the post in Blogger-HAT - not to the post in the new blog.

Any pictures, videos etc in the old blog will still be in the same place that they were in (Picasa-web-albums, YouTube, Google Videos etc).

If you have imported more than the number of posts that Blogger allows per day (currently 50 I think) then to make any more posts today you will need to complete the captcha-test (ie entering the letters in the funny-shaped word).   This will go away approximately 24 hours after you last enter more that the maximum-posts-per-day.

Importing to the same blog

If you try to import posts into the same blog that you exported them from, Blogger will not import any posts, and give you an error message.

If you do want to do this (eg to create a duplicate set of posts), then do the export, change some small detail of the original posts title or date/time, and then do the import. 

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