There’s an article on Hacker News today about not “building castles in other people’s gardens”. It’s a good point, but most people don’t want – or can’t – build a castle. They just want to be gardeners. 

Running a blog platform myself, this “vendor lock in” has been on my mind a lot. I don’t want to be that guy who pulls the rug from under people who have put good faith in the Pagecord platform! To counteract this I’ve made Pagecord open source (you could run it yourself) but there’s currently no way to transport your data elsewhere. This is a big problem, and I need to solve it. 

There are a few interoperable formats for exporting blogs (Wordpress XML, Micropub to name two) so I’ll probably start there. I also like the idea of exporting a Pagecord blog to Jekyll-friendly Markdown. This would make migrating a Pagecord account to a static site (perhaps using sitespec) fairly painless, so that's something to think about too.