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by derefr 4934 days ago
Also, Blogger, the service that the link in the paragraph "... publishing tools that epitomized all of these traits..." was referring to. Or, more modernly, Tumblr. These are all sites that give you your own [sub]domain, where you make the rules and you control (almost) all the data, and where, even if there are other mechanisms for connecting things together, you can still just pull an RSS feed of all the relevant content and mash up whatever you like.
1 comments
graue 4934 days ago
I wasn't aware that Tumblr had an export function, and it looks like, officially, it doesn't[1]. There is a third-party migration tool to WordPress[2], but that's about all I can find. So unfortunately, not all is roses.

It would be nice if there were a standard format for storing blog posts and their metadata and attachments, so you could move from anything to anything. Perhaps the nascent Tent protocol[3] could do that when it's mature.

1. http://smarterware.org/8026/why-not-tumblr

2. http://tumblr2wordpress.benapps.net/

3. https://tent.io

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Wilya 4933 days ago
Tumblr has a JSON API [1] that is fairly usable, and provides access to the essential parts of blogs (and terms of use explicitly allow building data portability applications on it, which is a nice touch). It's not instant-export, and I get the impression nobody uses it so it might not be rock solid, but if you need to export data, it's possible.

This tumblr2wordpress tool is probably built on it. So is Jekyll's tumblr importer. Honestly, the lack of export tools for Tumblr probably comes less from a lack of demand than anything else.

[1] http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2 [2] https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/blob/master/lib/jekyll/mig...

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icebraining 4934 days ago
As far as I'm concerned, there's already two formats: RSS and ATOM. One can "export" a Tumblr blog by simply appending /rss to the URLs.
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graue 4934 days ago
That seems to only provide the newest 20 posts.

If RSS went all the way back to the beginning, then you'd be right, it would get you 99% of the way there.

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icebraining 4934 days ago
You can append /rss to the pages, e.g. http://[blog].tumblr.com/page/2/rss

It'd be nice if they supported <link rel="next"> tags, but it's still extremely easy to dump the content.

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