Mr. Nolan at the Venture Chronicles has been pondering the exportability of blogs. With TypePad screwing up left and right, I can't blame him. And I certainly understand the desire to export a blog with images and attachments intact, and url's updated. I'd like to throw in my export request: could someone develop a way to export a blog into PDF? I know it seems backwards to take a living, breathing "conversation" and freeze it, Pompeii-like, at an arbitrary moment, but I was trying to do just that this weekend and found it impossible. Either I can export it into a flat text file (gee thanks), or I am left taking dozens and dozens of screenshots. I am far too lazy to deal with either option.
I can conceivably dig why a shortsighted company might want to make the blog-export functionality sub-par. If you were worried that your customers might leave you in droves for a competitor that, say, backs up it's customers' content properly and takes fewer than 16 seconds to load a page, wouldn't you be tempted to make leaving more complicated than it had to be?
But the PDF feature wouldn't even add any risk for that. Just saying.
Well...you can go to http://createpdf.adobe.com/?v=AHP and convert a URL to a PDF, so while you may have to do it page-by-page it can be done. Besides, you don't have that many posts. :)
I think the PDF format is a mistake though. What do you want it for? A PDF is only good at being a PDF, you can't turn it into, say...a book...later. Or restore your archives from it. You could import your posts directly into a new Blogger or Wordpress.com account (both are free and hosted) for storage/future importing purposes. That would give you more flexibility.
Posted by: Alicia | December 22, 2005 at 03:20 PM
Six Apart really isn't trying to lock you in. See this post from Ben: http://btrott.typepad.com/typepad/2005/08/open_data.html
Posted by: Jonathan Nolen | December 23, 2005 at 11:26 AM