After my flash of insight I’ve decided to build a tool to help me migrate apocryph.org away from drupal.

Requirements are:

• Work with my Drupal configuration
• Not so tightly coupled to my Drupal configuration that no one else can use it
• Output posts in a neutral format that users can post-process and import into other tools
• Preserve all the important elements of each post, including:
  • Formatting. Most posts are in Markdown, and a few are in SmartyPants. Those must be converted to XHTML using the same rules which generate the markup in Drupal
  • Files. A few of my posts have files attached, usually images but sometimes other stuff. Those files must be preserved themselves, and any references to the files from within a post (like IMG or A elements) must be preserved as well
  • Metadata. The tags, author, timestamp, published/unpublished flags must be preserved
  • Links.