blog platforms and backups

Confession: I've never really liked WordPress. However since v3.2 there have been some improvements that don't make me loathe it as much.

First, I can finally change the font used for the visual editor relatively easily. It requires adding in a function, borrowing editor-style.css from the default WP theme and hacking it up slightly, but the point is it can be done.

Second, the redesign of the admin interface is one that's not a big chunky browser-dragging mess; it actually loads fast and doesn't stutter all over the place.

Third - and this is the best part - you can finally download backups in date ranges. It used to be that when pulling down a backup it was all-or-nothing. Now you can download backups in a span as short as one month if you want.

Something I've been wanting to do for a while but couldn't was export every single one of my blog posts as individual emails. Impossible? Not at all; I've done it.

My very-brief explanation of my process of 'converting' blog posts into emails is like this:

1. Export the WordPress XML backups.
2. Post those files to a public web location.
3. Instruct an email client to pull the files down from that public location as pseudo-feeds.

The mail client doesn't care where an XML comes from as long as it thinks it's a real feed. It isn't as it's just a flat XML file, but the mail client knows no different, and the whole thing worked. After pulling in all the "messages", you can then push them to the cloud via IMAP.

Later on I may post a grotesquely-detailed document on how to do this. Won't be free because I had to figure out all this crap from scratch, as there is zero documentation anywhere on how it's done. And believe me, I looked.