If you are moving your blog, or just want to start afresh, you would definitely use some way to import your old content into the new place, instead of manually copying and pasting everything. Generally this means saving your database and importing into the new place. But:

  1. You have seen WordPress importing your/others’ blogs from other services automatically. Wasn’t that quick and easy.

  2. Your databse has become overly full of so much trash over the years and you would like to trim out all the fat and take just the meat (the posts, pages, comments, tags, custom fields etc)

So?? Did you know that WordPress can import from WordPress?

Well, WordPress gives you way to “export” your blog into an XML file that they call as “WordPress eXtended RSS” (or WXR in short). And then, you can just wipe out everything (or go to your new server), install WP afresh and just import this file into it. A no frills, easy way to make your blog lean again, without losing out on any content.

For more details, read Jeffro2pt0’s post on weblogstoolcollection.com.