In mid October 2010, I decided to take my weblog away from the clutches of Tumblr and move things to a more reliable platform. It was then that I found Squarespace, which thus far has proved itself as a robust, flexible and supremely reliable service that doesn’t lock-in your data. At any time I can export the contents of this entire site into a compatible XML document that will retain all of the relevant data structures that it currently has.
My next project that I’d like embark on though is proving to be a bit of a challenge. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s possible, so I’d like to put a call out to anyone who could possibly think of a solution.
What I would like to do is find a way to extract the content of all posts ever created and export them as individual plain text files. The key requirement is that these text files absolutely must retain the Markdown formatting that was used when they were created.
I thought about exporting the entire site in a WordPress/Movable Type compatible XML document and then importing it into my own hosted solution. This however, doesn’t solve my main request, which is to have a plain text copy of every single post as an individual file.
My reasoning is primarily that I would like to have plain text backups of all posts. The other reason is that I want to start writing my posts in my own text editor of choice, and save copies locally — all while being backed up to Dropbox/Simplenote.
I should note that I have no plans on moving away from Squarespace. I merely suggested importing my data into a self-hosted WordPress/Movable Type setup as that’s the only way I can think of that I might be able to extract the data that I need.
If anyone can offer any suggestions, I would be most grateful.