In an article I found via Doc’s blog,  the complaint/warning is one I’ve experienced firsthand recently as I attempt to move into Movable Type from Radio:

The greatest problem, however, is not the limitations of the front end of this software, but rather what goes on behind the curtain, so to speak. As bloggers add content to their sites, the programs update and store HTML pages in a collection of directories spread throughout a Web site. Each tool has its own directory structure, its own names for the archives it compiles of past postings, its own method of updating each page.

That way lies trouble. While the actual pages in a blog may be simple HTML, the sum total of elements in a blog is a giant heap of files and folders understood only by the tool a blogger is using at present. What would happen if you were to switch tools tomorrow? With even the simplest blogs, many users would be daunted by the need to move files, change directories, get the new tools to hook up with the old. In short, each new tool would break your current blog. There simply is no portability under the current structure.

I had to look long and hard to find the right tool to move Radio entries to Movable Type,  and after that was done, I still had to face the SHORTCUTS problem (Radio’s convenience feature for creating links to other internal entries by using the title of the entry in quotes becomes a hindrance to migrating the blog to another system.  If there was a clearer path to re-generating the links from the Radio “shortcut” ,  or if Radio’s file building/updating process of rebuilding blog pages after addtions and updates were a bit more transparent,  then there could be a smoother “interblog” relationship.  But then again,  that might make some Weblog tool makers nervous. 

What’s needed is a uniform way for every blog tool to understand the blogs created by another tool and to pick them up when a user switches tools, much like the way browsers can share HTML.

Amen to that.  I would love to find a solution to getting the “Stories” I wrote in Radio (and are the destination to the many of the shortcut links that are ,  as of now,  still “unconverted”)