I recently made the decision to start doing my blogging using org2blog. I've been using WordPress to host a couple of blogs (Radios Appear and Gurave, as well as my friend Chet's blog Miscellaneous Heathen) for the last couple of years, but I've always done my writing in Emacs (using Textile for formatting), and then simply cut-and-pasted what I wrote into WordPress's text entry box: of course a more integrated solution based entirely in Emacs sounded attractive.
And, indeed, I like the results. In addition to the original two blogs, I'm using this workflow to write my articles about exploring Emacs (Do You Even Lisp?) as well as this blog (I gave some serious thought to Brent Yorgey's Blog Literately package, appropriately written in Haskell, but first, the Debian Haskell situation is in a lot of flux right now and I didn't want to have to work that hard to package it and second, a little consistency of tooling is always welcome).
Being the sort of compulsive neat-freak that I am, though, I decided that it wasn't enough to just create new articles using org2blog—what I really wanted was to export all the existing articles in my long-term blogs into my org2blog setup.
I was originally going to do this using Perl—it's been my go-to language for the last 17 years, I can whip up what I want in it faster than in anything else, and I've been doing it long enough to write code that is readable after the fact. Besides, I already have a script for doing some WordPress interaction, so it would be a great starting point.
And then I decided that I was going to do it in Haskell (which I have come to realize was probably an even better choice than I initially expected—I'll talk about that later).
So, the task is to download all the articles in my existing sites, reformat them into org-mode files with appropiate metadata for org2blog, store them locally in a hierarchy that mirrors the one on the server.
I think it's going to be easier than I expected.