Darren's looking for ideas on how to migrate data from one blog engine to the next. This has been discussed before a lot, I'm sure, but it's not a bad conversation to have.

So what's the answer? Sorry, I don't have that. I know that it would have been nice when developing PostXING to have an api that gives you more control or gives better querying ability, and I also know that none of the APIs that Darren talks about are it. For all of the metablog api's shortcomings, I find it at least decent enough to not have made a post using the web interface of my blogs since writing PostXING. I agree with Darren that the atom api does not seem complete. No categories? That's weird. If you're worried about being different from rss in some small way (and come on, that's what it's about in the first place, innit?) call them "labels" or "tags" but give me a way to categorize my thoughts. Please.

One person whose thoughts I'd like to hear on the idea of a better blogging api is ScottW who has written a few external apis for different evolutions of the popular aspnetweblog software that we all know and love and call CS::Blogs these days.

A better blogging API

I'll also do some searching over the next week or so to see what others have been discussing around this topic as it is obviously something which must have come up a lot.  Maybe we have to wait until industry heavyweights start to build blogging products into their core platforms before clear spec's start to emerge around what is needed from an API that would allow for the programmatic disovery and interaction with blogs. 

And then, who knows how long it will take for the current blog engines to implement that?