Quartz by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen. Flickr Hosted

I used to joke that the second feature to write is export. I don’t joke about it any more. Export is the 2nd feature you should implement for your software or web service.

There is nothing that says you care about your customers like making it easy for them to get their content out. Bonus points if you choose an export format that is already popular and well documented.

If you really love your customers, the exported data will be richer than the raw material they originally entered.

That, of course, makes import the 3rd feature to write. Don’t support importing from competing applications until your product is ready, because migrating from another product is already a scary enough situation without finding yourself using a buggy, incomplete product.

If you are interested, let me know and we can set up a private blog on WordPress.com for you to import into. Bonus is that you will have a backup of your blog ready to go live if anything ever befalls TypePad.

This importer wouldn’t be possible without the heroic effort Ronald Heft Jr put into creating a TypePad AtomPub importer for WordPress — it’s not his fault TypePad still doesn’t have a way to export your full blog.

What’s an AtomPub? While working on this importer Noel contacted TypePad support only to have them tell him they don’t know what AtomPub is, and that they don’t support it.

Anyway, as I said, if you are a TypePad customer, and want to participate in open source development by testing this exporter, or would just like a backup of your blog ready to launch on WordPress.com, leave a comment or send me an email.