So I exported my site using “Export theme and Markdown”. In the results, within the “content” folder, I only see the .md files with a link to the image file, but not the image file itself. I can’t find the photographs anywhere else either (the only images are ones relating to the theme).
How do I download my content including the actual photographs, not just links? Thanks!
I haven’t tried it for myself, but some of the other export options should include your photos as well. Three ways that explicitly mention uploads/photos are:
- Blog Archive Format (which is a ZIP file with all your posts and file uploads).
- Under the Design section, there’s a setting to enable GitHub archiving. This automatically copies posts as HTML, JSON, and uploaded photos to a GitHub repository about once a week.
- In Micro.blog 2.1 for macOS, File → Export has 2 options that will run locally on your Mac:
- Markdown (download all your posts as Markdown with front matter, including photos).
All those options that @sod mentioned are good for including images. The “Export theme and Markdown” is designed to be a smaller export and does not include images.
Thanks for the info! A humble suggestion: if the .bar file is just a .zip file, it would be good to actually give it a .zip filename, so that people receiving it know what to do with it instead of wondering what the hell a .bar file is.
The .bar file is designed to be easy back up or move around, for example importing from or to another blog system, so keeping it as a single file is helpful. Micro.blog for macOS also supports double-clicking to open and preview a .bar file directly. As more blog systems support .bar, I hope that it can be a universal format that makes blog migration easier.
Which blog systems support .bar? If I export my micro.blog blog as a .bar file what can I do with it that doesn’t require a computer science degree or background in coding?
I’m not aware of any major blog systems, other than Micro.blog, with support for importing .bar files. It’s a new format, proposed by Manton.
You can unzip the file (you might have to rename the extension to .zip) and then do whatever you want with the photo, HTML, and JSON files in the archive. Save them as a backup or take the data elsewhere.
Manton has a page[1] about .bar in the current version of the online book that seems to suggest that .bar is the way to go. However, until there is more support for .bar, "…do whatever you want " is only useful to geeks/nerds.
I think .bar offers very little value compared to WordPress (.wxr) exports (which include posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, navigation menus, and custom posts).
I can easily export a WordPress .wxr and import to WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, Ghost, Wix, Squarespace, Tumblr, Drupal, etc. etc. etc.
Unfortunately, it seems that micro.blog does not export menu structures and pages. It exports blog entries only.
I’m still waiting for the PDF version of the book for my Kickstarter reward. ↩︎
The main reason I came up with .bar is that WXR does not include any photos. That is a huge limitation that makes it unsuitable for backing up a blog. Most people only have a few standalone pages but potentially thousands of photos.
Anyway, should be easy for us to add pages to WXR and .bar. The pages are also already included in the “theme” export.