Rob Fahrni quotes Dave Winer about migrating blog content:

"Choose software that's easy to archive. Ideally you should just have to make a copy of a folder to back it up. Most bloggiong software is nowhere near that simple. " - This is yet another reason I LOVE my statically published weblog pages. I've moved my weblog to a few different hosts over the years and I can do exactly what Dave does; I tar up a directory, copy it to the new host, untar, and I have my weblog up and operating. Easy. It's also darned easy to backup, using the same method.

It would be nice if it were that simple, but it's not. Let's take the simplest case: a bunch of static HTML pages sitting in a directory structure. Easy to migrate, right? Well, assuming that every single link referring to your own posts uses a relative url, sure. If not (and I can guarantee you, most content will not be this pristine), not so much. You may have migrated your blog, but it'll be full of dead links.

If you're lucky, it's just a recursive directory script doing a massive copy/replace job. If you're unlucky - and your rehosting doesn't involve an identical directory structure (for whatever reason) - then it's a real mess.

Backing up a blog might be easy - for the ones hosted here, for instance, it's a simple tar command off a set of directories - we don't have static html, but we don't have a database, either. There's no telling how many absolute url landmines there are in there, though.

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