The input was valid. It just wasn't clean. It had empty tags, bold tags that wrapped a line break and ended at the beginning of the second line, and other oddit

The input was valid. It just wasn't clean. It had empty tags, bold tags that wrapped a line break and ended at the beginning of the second line, and other oddities that don't quite translate to markdown. There were also site-specific conventions that I replaced (basically, how I handle footnotes). The nice part is that I could fix those issues with regex. I could fix hundreds of page in a few keystrokes, and only commit changes if they looked right. I also fixed thousands of little things that were impossible to fix before, because editing text files is trivial. To migrate the content, I converted the templates to output plain markdown files instead of HTML. I also had one page that was a plain text list of all entries to migrate. A script read the list and saved each rendered markdown file. I can't overstate how pleasant it is to work with plain text files. Today, I'm reviewing 450 locations with the Google Places API. I fixed a dozen businesses that moved or closed. This would have taken days before. It was to tedious to even try.