A DePressing Development

The end of the year is coming up, and that’s often a time of thinking about disposing of past mistakes and starting fresh in the new year. It was around this time 3 years back that I decided to ditch Drupal and set up this blog as an experiment in RAGtag design. I had been tired of overblown blogging solutions for a while, dating back over a decade when I maintained this old WordPress site

Despite it not being active for many years, that blog still has to be “maintained” because people can comment on (or, more likely, spam) past posts. I also do still want all those old posts to be available for people to read, so I can’t just delete the whole blog without setting up some kind of alternative. Enter another RAGtag approach.

WordPress does allow users to export their sites via a customized RSS format. I did that for my WordPress blog way back in 2013 when I shut it down, but I haven’t really done anything with it since then, because most “solutions” to getting something readable out of it meant simply re-importing the file into a new WordPress installation. Needless to say, I had no interest in doing that.

But, hey, XML is something most modern browsers can easily handle with just a little bit of JavaScript. So I recently sat down and cranked out the code necessary to go through the export and display a similar page. Check out my WordPress Blog Export RSS Viewer if you have a similar need. It’s all done in an incredibly lightweight 5574 bytes! It doesn’t (yet) display all the information available, but it’s a good starting point for people who might want to run away from WordPress but don’t know where else to go.

It’s also easy to tweak the code to display a regular feed. Did you know ImpossiblyStupid has an RSS feed? If you’re not subscribed, here’s a preview: