Typepad to WordPress: It’s Done!
After significant and careful consideration, I’ve decided to migrate my Connecting the Dots blog (which I started in December of 2004 using the Typepad hosted service) to a WordPress installation on a server I control.
While Typepad has made many changes that are good for the blogging community, the platform is still too limiting and the energy in the ecosystem surrounding the service is, well, non-existent. Argue with me all you want (and many have already) but WordPress is giving me what I want, how I want it, and the limitations on growing with Typepad are too constrictive.
The sad part is that exporting from Typepad is a God-awful mess of code. From URL’s that were short, then not short, and underscores (“_”) that turned into dashes (“-“), I’ve had to invest dozens of hours into changing the blog over.
The other sad part is that getting MY images from THEIR servers is a nightmare. While importing into WordPress kinda, sorta works (but permalinks are all hosed up), all images are left on the Typepad server. I used a caching plugin to capture them, but it’s a band-aid and not a comfortable, long term solution.
After waiting days and days for a response from Anil Dash, he finally responded with a connection to a guy named Mark Simmons, but by that time I was already down the road with the migration.
While I understand that Six Apart (Typepad parent) has zero incentive to help me get MY data out of THEIR system (data *I* own by the way), they’ve made it work juuuuust barely enough that they can stand on a box of righteousness and argue the finer points of ATOM and migration.
I’m paid up through December but just set the domain to transfer and will clean up loose ends if necessary, especially the RSS feeds so I don’t lose you, my subscribers.
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About Steve Borsch
Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.
Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
Steve,
The new site looks great. I’ve followed your blog since your social whitepaper about 4 years ago. Is possible to still get a copy of it?
It’s sort of sad about TypePad. They offer a good platform but it truly isn’t evolving. I even have a hard time recommending it to beginners now. WordPress just offers so much more. When we talk to people about scalability, well TP just can’t cut it.
Congrats on the move.
You’re the first comment on the new blog! Thanks for the kinds words.
Since I haven’t updated this report since late 2007 for release in Jan of 2008, I took it down (sort of) but the link is still active here: https://iconnectdots.com/2008/06/rpc-report.html
You can see it in full screen mode or choose “Menu” and download a PDF of it.
heads up ? do you need me to do something to stay subscribed ?
Congrats! From following the ExpressionEngine forums, it’s obvious migration from/to any system is a royal pain. Just too many variables, too many different database tables, especially if you are using memberships for commenting.
Saw you Tweeted about using MAMP locally – It’s a wonderful little environment, been using it for local dev for years.
Tom — Nope….just stayed subscribed *if* you’re using the iconnectdots.com feed instead of the first one borsch.typepad.com (I bought the domain and mapped it in 2005).
Thanks for reading!
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Steve