I don’t know exactly when it was added, but WordPress.com finally has a way to export your media uploads! When I moved off of WordPress.com, a couple of years ago, the only way to “get” your media was to export your posts, and your new site would download the files as the posts that used them were imported. This was obviously very error-prone, wouldn’t work for media not used in posts, and spectacularly failed to work for me — leaving a great deal of my uploaded media stranded on the WordPress servers. With this new export option I’ve just downloaded 1.5GB of media from two sites I had hosted on the service, so I might finally be able to reconstruct several old posts. Happy days!
You’ve come a long way, baby.
I remember when WordPress first appeared. I’d deployed the b2 blogging engine a couple of times before, and anything which made b2 easier to install/use/adapt was welcome. Amongst the (many) blog systems I’d tried up to then, b2 had the lowest technical barriers but was still an exercise in frustration to get installed and configured. In those early days of blog systems each product had its own quirks, and their own belief about what a blog was and how it should work. WordPress always tried to come across as “the Writer’s” blogging system; once you had it setup to your preferences, it would stay out of the way. For the most part, anyway.
WordPress was never perfect, and it’s still far from it, but you have to admire any system (particularly on the web) which is still going strong after 10 years, while remaining fairly close to it’s original vision and principles. It made writing on the web more accessible to a generation of users, and for all its faults that should be celebrated.
[I originally posted this as a comment on Hacker News]