I just wanted to run it through a transmogrifier and viola! a text file.

Are their any places that do this conversion thing? It would be a great gig.

By the way, when I look at the source for the pages that wordpress serves, they're generating XHTML, which means that the web pages are actually (a specific dialect of) XML. Other than the fact that web browsers happen to be what understands XHTML, it's really not fundamentally different than SVG, or MathML, or the WordPress export format, or any other dialect of XML that's out there.

Here's a way to think about it: like a lot of other people, I speak English. If you look at my blog, though, you'll find quite a bit of vocabulary that most people don't have. People who talk about economics, or art theory, or hockey, or any of a whole bunch of other things have additional words that they use all the time, but they're still speaking English. XML is a bit like English in this analogy, while XHTML and the other dialects are XML with the special vocabulary.

Does anyone know how to convert .xml files with these or any other products? I basically want a file of my blog posts and comments with nothing else.

Something tells me I'm looking to do something that can't be done. I've spent the past 24 hours looking for ways to do it, even emailing Altova who has not answered, before posting here. just wondering if anyone knows a good way to do this.

Thanks.

It can move posts and comments if you have privilege to upload a php file to the root directory of your blog. Or it can only move posts, e.g. for blogs on WordPress.com

you may either post by post save them all into separate HTML files using a 'Post2Blog' (or any other client which can handle w/ MetaWeblog API, like dotPost, BlogJet et al) and then post 'em all to WP;

or try to construct a shell script using 'mtsend.py' which can make it all (get/post) in batch run -- the last one is also not very easy task though ;-)

hence it can be transformed by XSLT transformers or parsed into another XML format like HTML, or tagged text like MTimport which can be fed into some clients like Post2Blog (HTML) or mtsend (MTimport).

well, it ain't necessarily to be a script guru: MS Word/Excel (since 2K3) can do that to! they only need a valid scheme to transform.

so, if we manage get the content of an RSS feed into offline client, the last one can send (post) it right into your any WP driven blog via XML-RPC API ==> we don't need buit-in WP import plugins and don't depend on them at all!

sorry, right now, I got no easy ready-made decisions just some clues where move to.

none (besides sysadmins & developers) at WP.com can edit .PHP scripts. docs you read on codex relates to WordPress software installed on your own/paid web-host only.

despite that MSN Spaces since recently implemented a MetaWeblog API, anyway it doesn't help to import comments programaticaly. hardly that importer which would scrape Spaces' website (like the one for Blogger) will be made soon (if ever).

so it's better just to wait for an RSS importer or meanwhile try to import yourself using offline desktop weblog clients/command line utilities/scripts etc.