Who?I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Have fun exploring!
Click the Start Menu to learn more.
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Squarespace Export to Markdown Converter
I've just made public a small tool to people migrate their Squarespace sites to Markdown-based platforms like Jekyll, Hugo, or Ghost. My wife had a Squarespace site and wanted to leave it. It turned out to be a huge hassle to get the content out in a way that was easy to work with on another platform.
The Squarespace Export to Markdown Converter is a Python script that transforms Squarespace's XML exports into clean, portable Markdown files and a directory of associated images.
Key Features
- Converts Squarespace content to Markdown files
- Downloads and organizes images from your Squarespace site
- Configurable settings for image URL and namespace URI
- Simple command-line interface
- Supports Python 3.6 and higher
To use, first trigger an export from Squarespace. This will download a squarespace.xml file.
Here's a quick example of how to use it:
python script.py --download_imagesThis command will process your squarespace.xml file, convert all posts to Markdown, and download the associated images.
python script.py --download_images --img_url https://your-custom-url.com --namespace http://your-custom-namespace.comCheck out the GitHub repository.
