Typepad Is Shutting Down
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The blogging world is reeling as Typepad announces its shutdown, sparking a heated discussion about the challenges of migrating decades-old content to new platforms. While some commenters, like Alex3917, tout the benefits of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simplify the migration process, others, such as cube00, warn that LLMs can hallucinate and mess up content. A more nuanced approach is suggested by qingcharles, who proposes using LLMs to write a script that exports and imports data without directly touching the content. The real headache, many agree, is preserving 20 years' worth of inbound links.
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That is annoying indeed - it would be nice if the Web had some way to keep links eternally valid. But people didn't even manage Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to work beyond the death of the publishing companies that issued them...
Perhaps links could be auto-replaced to archive.org links if they ceased to exist?
TypePad’s export process is awful: the output is a poorly formatted .txt file which is hard to parse reliably. The export process itself fails at least half the time. There’s no export process for images or style files. Automated crawl processes fail.
I LOL’ed at this part of the post:
>> If you have any questions, please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions page here.
The “here” link 404s.
Even so, 22 years is a good run!
It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
$500 ÷ 12 = 41.67 per month.
For a personal/fun publishing platform that might be a bit pricey, but that's less than what many people pay for their cell phone plan.
That being said, it still had as much tech debt as any other large application, not to mention being 100% Perl, which would have made sustaining engineering pretty difficult the last few years.
The biggest issue is that people have moved on from the sort of self-publishing that it made possible. Chronological blogs have been out of fashion for over a decade. I'm sad to see this happen but not surprised.
I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.
I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.
As for the reasons for the shutdown, I can only speculate, but the maintenance costs for an old huge Perl codebase would likely be a factor. Also the current/final owner of TypePad is the same parent company as BlueHost, and for the past five years they've been refusing new TypePad users, and instead directing folks to BlueHost's paid WordPress hosting. So TypePad's revenue has been dropping for years by design, and consolidation of product offerings seems like the end-goal.
https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs
https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/br-8da940...
Considering I also follow a few blogs, there are a silent crowd who reads blogs.
Yes. We call them newsletters now. Podcasts, if they're audio. Many are both.
RSS is still alive, and if you're the type of person who doesn't just want the alg telling you what to look at next, then it's still valuable.
There's some many content creators right now, for example, who are specializing in sharing AI knowledge.
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
I’m not a customer, but in today’s world, I would actually prefer that when the service shuts down, all accounts and published data are destroyed. Just wiped completely. Otherwise, what are the odds that customer PII gets sold off and the service owner licenses the previously hosted posts and comments to an AI company?
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
https://textpattern.com
We're looking at how feasible it would be to do an export-import conversion:
https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=52645
In 1977 you said that computers were answers in search of questions. Has that changed?
Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s…
You’d start to teach it about yourself. And it would just keep storing all this information about you and maybe it would recognize that every Friday afternoon you like to do something special, and maybe you’d like it to help you with this routine. So about the third time it asks you: “Well, would you like me to do this for you every Friday?” You say, “Yes,” and before long it becomes an incredibly powerful helper. It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: “You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row.”
Steve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview: https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-jobs-1984-access-magazin... https://archive.md/uSuxo
Who would I contact?
https://www.newfold.com/
Like the days where it seemed like everyone maintained a Blogger site and wrote longer form content?
Maybe it's more because blogging was a fluke to begin with. Kind of like in my junior high (2002?) every kid had an online journal (Xanga) that died when we moved to sharing those thoughts on Myspace.
Maybe it could be seen is more of a ephemeral shared "mass-delusion" that we should maintain blogs and post our thoughts online about favorite topics. (Hmm, I think this seems very reasonable.)
But moving to social media doesn't seem to explain everything. People had long form blogs about all subject you could think of. And it's not like it was obsoleted by posting those thoughts on Facebook. Instead the idea of individuals posting their long (text) thoughts on hobby topics just seemed to almost die completely.
And it's not the only method anymore. We are far more connected as far as social media is concerned so it might feel like blogging is dead.
I mean, most posts I click are individual blogs here in HN. WordPress blogs kind of things just moved to 3rd party sites like medium etc I mentioned above. Hosting WordPress blogs were easier then. Now it's using Medium, Substack where you can make money as well.
I wrote about this a while ago. Where I share a lot more links of independent blog scenes- https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.
At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.
Blogging _seems_ like it was more popular in retrospect because for a while it was a large percentage of content _on the internet_, but the internet wasn't that popular at the time. Social media now absolutely dwarfs the size of any of the blogging sites even at their peak, and Substack and Medium are probably roughly the same size that the old blogging sites were.
Moving to Ghost now, will see what happens, but I'm not optimistic.
Over 24 million page views, lost in the ether....
https://imgur.com/a/mHBQBGD
Why do the two sites show different content, despite both being hosted on TypePad?
If you want to try out my app Pagecord (https://pagecord.com) I'd happily try and help you migrate over.
Biggest problem is the death of the *.typepad.com domain though. I wonder if they'd be willing to add 301 redirects for a year or three? One can hope...
https://pagecord.com/app/posts
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>I wonder if they'd be willing to add 301 redirects for a year or three? One can hope...
From my painful experience with them of over two decades re: failing to do stuff they should've been doing, I would estimate the likelihood of them even responding to a request like that now is an imaginary number.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
This is a dead horse topic but so much of social media today is rage bait, being sold something, or being scammed into something else. I'm nostalgic for that era of the web.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
Click here if you want to help preserve all of TypePad when the DPoS starts:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
If you need to move over your typepad blog, I can help. It has a free plan as well.
Of course I want to save it, it’s priceless history — but every method I’ve tried (I’m sure there’s more) has failed. It seems to not be “crawlable” or something. The Wayback Machine tell me it can’t scrape it.
I manually moved a few things years ago. But I sure can’t do it all, there must be thousands of posts in my inventory, tens of thousands of comments. Boy did we have fun there for awhile.