Posts Tagged ‘typepad’

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.