Before I started this humble WordPress.com blog I ran another self-hosted one at www.andrewcurrie.ca — that domain is currently one of those “lifestream” thingies, but you can still see my previous blog there if you know where to look (not anymore, sorry). It runs on a proprietary blog engine called ExpressionEngine. This is important.
For reasons I won’t go into here, I want to move my previous blog off of my domain and import it into either Blogger or Vox — neither of which I’m really using at the moment. But getting my almost 600 posts out of ExpressionEngine is needlessly difficult, and doesn’t seem to work. Even if I could manage to do it the resulting data is still only readable by Movable Type.
By comparison, I can easily export my content from WordPress.com for a WordPress installation of my own should I ever choose to do so. And because of the relative ubiquity of WordPress there are more tools available for importing into other blogging platforms.
But it sure would be nice to have to have some standards here…
Andrew Currie 
4 responses to “Blogging Platforms Need Open Standards Too!”
AC:
When I set up my blog I realized just from my initial research that the different formats are completely incompatible. I’m happy with Blogger since it’s hooked into my Gmail account and I can mail in an entry. I write in Word or Open Office, so I could transfer my blog to another home if needed, but it would be nice to have some sort of generic format since i doubt all the links or embeds would carry over easily, especially at those moments where I wonder what the grass is like on the WordPress side of the blog fence.
Ed
And I could copy and paste each of my 600 entries into a new blogging engine — but I’d have to manually date them and do the same for the comments on each post.
There needs to be a better solution than this!
AC:
Yikes! Copy ‘n’ paste is definitely not the way to go!
Ed
Update: The export issue has been solved. As for all the comments, I have to manually transcribe those by hand.
Major fail.