WriteDaily Micro-Update: Export, Data Portability, and a Note on Privacy

Two small but important updates for WriteDaily.

Export Is Live

You can now export any entry — or your entire writing history — as Markdown or plain text. The export bundles all entries into a single .zip with one file per day, named by date. This was the most requested feature from the first year.

Why it matters: your 750 words a day shouldn’t be locked inside someone else’s tool. Export means you can take your writing anywhere — turn entries into blog posts, compile a manuscript, or just keep a local backup.

Data Portability as a Principle

Building the export feature clarified something I’ve believed but hadn’t articulated: WriteDaily should make it easy to leave. If the tool holds your data hostage, it’s not serving you — it’s trapping you.

The export is lossless. Sentiment analysis metadata, pace data, word counts — everything comes with the text. If you decide to stop using WriteDaily tomorrow, nothing you created stays behind.

A Note on Privacy

While building export, I reviewed how WriteDaily handles data end-to-end. A few things worth stating explicitly:

• Your entries are private. There’s no public sharing, no social feed, no discoverability. WriteDaily is a private writing tool.
• Sentiment analysis runs on the server. The LIWC processing happens server-side. If you’re uncomfortable with that, the export lets you take your text elsewhere.
• No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Facebook pixels, no tracking scripts. The only metrics collected are the ones you see on your stats page.

I’m not saying WriteDaily’s privacy model is perfect. But I want to be transparent about how it works. If you try it, your words stay yours.