The case for .bar: manton.org

@manton It’s always a odd to me that when people make these “Let’s Try Different Blogging Hosts” posts that they ignore the broken support of interoperability from so many of the options.

Seems especially problematic when you consider the resources available to the likes of Automattic and Ghost. Surely it’s even more important to expect them to do a better job at enabling their customers to have the freedom to move.

@SimonWoods what pisses me off more is that I’ve seen people complain about .bar (even though there are a bunch of options from MB to export and .bar is pretty easy to work with) while non-ironically praising the terrible formats of other services and that other services are bad at supporting alternatives to their own import/export.

@jsonbecker @SimonWoods Stockholm syndrome, perhaps? You love what you’re used to, even it’s clearly out to hurt you, milk every penny out of your wallet. And you let it, because you love it, sort of.

@manton Am wondering if support for .bar would improve if there were an official website for it, with some type of specification and examples, much like there is for JSON Feed. Also, maybe .bar support could be added to WordPress, Ghost, etc. via their plugin systems?

@paulrobertlloyd Yes, both of those things would help for sure. I’m often not sure where to link to because there’s not an official site for it.

@paulrobertlloyd Decided to move ahead with part of this and registered blogarchive.org.

@manton let us know when the site is up!

@manton

Have you seen the Data Liberation project that is a focus of WordPress this year?

Migrating your site to WordPress, or exporting all your content from WordPress, should be possible in one click. I want WordPress’ export format to become the lingua franca of CMSes, whether coming to WordPress or moving within WordPress. 

https://wordpress.org/news/2024/01/data-liberation-in-2024/

I proposed your .bar format as a solution here: https://github.com/WordPress/data-liberation/discussions/51

@manton I know the mac app supports it– but it seems a bit weird that I can’t import a .bar into micro.blog, from the web.

@rossk Completely agree. The archives can be so big, it’s harder to process them on the web, but it’s time for us to work on that. I’ll make it a priority.