Richie, 
My Home
My Blog
Export Blog Entries

You'll get a zipped download xml file.
It's not a complete pop open and everything will look just like it does on your blog, but more of a "here's all the words in your posts".

Richie, I feel like our buddy, Brad Andersohn is who taught us to do that several years ago but, I don't remember. Perhaps Brad will be able to share the instructions here. In the meantime, I'll be searching for you.

This techie deficient member will be parked and reading but can offer absolutely no assistance. Good luck!

Brad Andersohn 

But what to do with it if we're not putting it Wordpress, but just want clean text backups of all our posts? What other than Wordpress opens it? It's just a 20 page long list of that data format? 

I'm getting a Zip file with a Microsoft Edge HTML Doc inside with this data gibberish:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

These are the kinds of afterthoughts we have after posting on third-party sites we have no control over. Best practice is to save all posts on your hard drives, either in HTML format, Word format, or in Notepad for future use. 

I am curious Richie & You - why do you ask this ... now, after all these years?

Hey All - here is what I found so far... 

AR was built on "Ruby on Rails" platform many decades ago, and after downloading (exporting) my own blog just now, and NOT using wordpress to import it, I found the following:

Here's what's going on with your file:

File type: It's a .gz (gzip-compressed) file containing XML. The .gz extension means it's a single file compressed with gzip — not a zip archive.

How to open it:

The simplest way on a Mac/Linux terminal is:

gunzip -c blog_entries_xml.gz | less
# or
zcat blog_entries_xml.gz | head -50

On Windows, you can use 7-Zip to decompress it, or tools like Python.

In Python:

import gzip

with gzip.open("blog_entries_xml.gz", "rt", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    content = f.read()
print(content[:1000])

What's in it — and a heads-up: The file contains XML with a list of <blog-entry> elements, but unfortunately the data inside each entry is broken. Every entry looks like this:

<blog-entry type="BlogEntry">#&lt;BlogEntry:0x00007f0c9c3e14f8&gt;</blog-entry>

That #<BlogEntry:0x00007f0c9c3e14f8> is a Ruby object memory address — it's what you get when a Ruby object is serialized to XML without properly implementing a to_xml method.

In plain terms, the actual blog post content (title, body, date, etc.) was never serialized — only a placeholder pointing to where the object lived in memory.

PROBLEM:

This means the file doesn't contain recoverable blog post data. It looks like it was exported from a Ruby on Rails app with a bug in the XML serialization.

SOLUTION:
To get the real data, you'd need to re-export it from the original database/application with the serialization fixed.

Thanks for asking the question, Richie. I'm scrolling through the answers and will give it a try. 

I went to the archives and loaded each of my twenty years as a PDF. So i have all of my blogs linked to easily find them. Not sure the links would work IF there was no more AR.  Is this what you are looking for Richie & You ? or Brad Andersohn 

There is a button for this, I suspect the results will not be as pretty as we would like.

I believe that it was designed a few decades ago so that people could migrate their blog to wordpress.