Re: [syndication] Archival RSS: Toward Weblog Portability

["Bill Kearney" <ml_yahoo@ideaspace.net>]

> I'm not intimately familiar with all the blogging tools out there,
> but that article paints a pretty grim picture of the current "state of
> the art" in blogging.  Complains about style changes and file
> structures don't make any sense to me.  MoveableType, for example uses
> the flat files as an *output* format but the real data it stored in
> Berkeley DB or MySQL.
>
> I have to think that other tools are doing similar things.  Or do the
> others just use flat files with ad-hoc meta-data storage that isn't
> easily queried externally?

No, some tools, like Radio, don't give you the same degress of access as seen
via tempates in MT.  The data is /there/ of course, but access to it is perhaps
a bit different and somewhat more difficult.  To the programmatically inclined,
if you know a standard language like perl then MT is probably more accessible.

> It's not like portability means parsing HTML to extract the content
> from the markup and navigation links.  If I wanted to move my content
> to another system, I'd go to the *source* of the data--either export
> it from MT or go to MySQL/BDB directly.

-shameless plug-  If you want to move from Radio to MT, I've written an
exporter:
http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/misc/radio/radio8/exporter

> Maybe I'm missing something, but blogging hasn't stormed the business
> world because of *cultural* and *organizational* limitations, not
> technical ones.

Probably a combination of both.

-Bill Kearney