11 ms·
Typepad is shutting down
- scblock 1y agoSeptember 30 is a pretty small window to migrate. Hopefully it's enough.
- Alex3917 1y agoAt least with LLMs, we can just write a query to migrate the export to whatever target format we want. The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.
- _verandaguy 1y agoWas this somehow not doable without LLMs? It's trivial data massaging.
- cube00 1y agoIt's too bad the LLMs will hallucinate and mess up the content while doing that migration.
- qingcharles 1y agoI think the best way would be to get an LLM to write a script that would export/import the data, so it only writes the code, doesn't touch the data.
- jll29 1y ago> The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links. 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?
- nonfamous 1y agoCoincidentally, and fortunately, I was already in the process of migrating a blog with 10 year’s worth of content from TypePad. It’s not enough. 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.
- scblock 1y agoThat's unfortunate. Good luck.
- omg_ketchup 1y agoThe link has a typo. It should point to: https://help.typepad.com/shutdown-faq.html https://help.typepad.com/shutdown-faq.html
- pabs3 1y agoWhats the URL? ArchiveTeam is planning on saving all the blogs to archive.org.
- evanelias 1y agoThey stopped accepting new users ~5 years ago, so it's hardly a surprise... but I'm still bummed to see this. Even so, 22 years is a good run!
- net01 1y agoThey should provide an option to move to https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- coolgoose 1y agoWas this just not profitable? Or not vc extra growth profitable?
- Alex3917 1y agoI have no doubt that it wasn't vc profitable, but my assumption (without any inside info) is that the real issue is that they were using some hacked up version of Movable Type that they couldn't upgrade. It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
- chipotle_coyote 1y agoMovable Type is, perhaps shockingly, still being actively developed; version 9 is coming out later this year. I’m not sure who the customer base is at this point—some years ago, they dropped the open source version and personal pricing and went to a very enterprise-ish $499/yr model—but I guess somebody is still giving them money.
- throw0101a 1y ago> very enterprise-ish $499/yr model $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.
- chipotle_coyote 1y agoThat’s fair; it just makes it pretty steep at the low end compared to many other hosted solutions like Ghost, WordPress, or Squarespace. It gives the strong impression that they’re not looking for new customers as much as trying to keep existing commercial ones on board for as long as possible.
- evanelias 1y agoMy understanding is that Movable Type remained hugely popular in Japan, even as WordPress overtook it elsewhere.
- tiffanyh 1y agoSad news. Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
- sandymcmurray 1y agoI think I used every Six Apart blogging tool and I loved Movable Type. It was a shame (for me as a user) when Ben and Mena sold the company.
- _the_inflator 1y agoTechnorati and the rise of Wordpress.
- adithyassekhar 1y agoThey're using the phrases "deactivated" and "not available to you" a number of times. No mentions of "delete" or "removed" on the page.
- jyunderwood 1y agoI was thinking the same thing. "Deactivated" is different from "deleted." 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?
- c0balt 1y agoMy best guess is that they probably will keep the data for a few weeks/months longer for the inevitable users who forgot to archive it and/or missed the announcement.
- schlauerfox 1y agousually it's an asset in bankruptcy depending on the ToS contract with end users.
- jstummbillig 1y agoKind of interesting that, with such an entrenched service that seems highly automatable, shutting it down is preferable to just keeping it running in maintenance mode or selling it.
- qq66 1y agoLot of content here that will go down with the ship. Hope the Internet Archive will mirror it.
- pabs3 1y agoClick here if you want to help the preservation effort when it starts: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
- Terretta 1y agoFor former MoveableType fans missing "the good old days" of CMS before headless CMS and the JAMstack took over the world, do take a look at: https://textpattern.com https://textpattern.com
- omnimus 1y agoI think the progression people went trough is MoveableType > Textpattern > Kirby so if you want the “latest generation” of the simple server rendered CMS you might as well try https://getkirby.com https://getkirby.com
- bigiain 1y agoI'd bet way more people went MovableType -> Wordpress and are mostly still there.
- petecooper 1y agoTextpattern project person here. We're looking at how feasible it would be to do an export-import conversion: https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=52645 https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=52645
- dazzaji 1y agoWow - I'd forgotten all about this but just realized I have posts from an entire phase of earlier professional life - topic by topic and event by event - on an old blog there. Amazingly the browser remembered my login so I was able to find the URL. It's been quite a trip down memory lane revisiting some of the posts. Not sure I need to keep any of that published but I'll at least scrape and store it somewhere for old times sake. Maybe I'll find some buried gem of an idea when I scan them during the great scrape. Or - optimistically - perhaps a future zillion-token context LLM will uncover some personal patterns that unleash deep and actionable insights. Irrespective of the measurable value, I just hate to see the old posts dissapear forever.
- adt 1y agoSteve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview: 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-magazine-interview https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-jobs-1984-access-magazin... https://archive.md/uSuxo https://archive.md/uSuxo
- pabs3 1y agoWhats the URL? ArchiveTeam is planning on saving all the blogs to archive.org.
- r0fl 1y agoHow would one go about buying typepad?? Who would I contact?
- jszymborski 1y agoWiki says Newfold Digital (nee Endurance International Group) own it. https://www.newfold.com/ https://www.newfold.com/
- MKRhere 1y agoEIG? Yeah, tough luck. This all makes sense now.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoDoes anyone have convincing macro ideas about why blogging died? Or maybe a link to some high level historian insights of the era? 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.
- CalRobert 1y agoIt still exists (Medium, etc) but the eyeballs are all on twitter, Bsky, TikTok, etc
- empath75 1y agoWhat happened is that long form writing on the internet bifurcated into professional work and social media, and a lot of popular bloggers either became influencers or professional writers, and the 'casual' bloggers moved to social media, especially facebook. People switching to phones over computers also made reading long form text more difficult. 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.
- epc 1y agoPersonally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life. 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.
- qingcharles 1y agoI just noticed they own blogs.com domain. That would have been worth a pretty penny at some point, maybe not as much now.
- lylo 1y agoIs anyone here affected by this? I'd be surprised but I'm curious
- bookofjoe 1y agoMe. I've been on Typepad since I started my blog in 2004. Even though it's clunky I've been able to use it for 21+ years. 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 https://imgur.com/a/mHBQBGD
- bookofjoe 1y agofirst Ghost post: https://bookofjoe.ghost.io/ https://bookofjoe.ghost.io/
- pabs3 1y agoGuess that is https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/ https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/ - adding it to the ArchiveTeam list of blogs to save.
- pogue 1y agoSomeone page Archive Team! https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page
- pabs3 1y agoOn their radar already, a Distributed Preservation of Service project is being looked into. Prepare your warriors! https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
- BrenBarn 1y agoSad to see a venerable blogging platform bite the dust. I never used it but do stumble across typepad blogs from time to time.
- nikcub 1y agoJust dug up my old Typepad blog and cringed at the 20 year old content, but definitely have to take a backup because I also used the photo album feature. We blogged back then more how we use Twitter today - short form thought bubble content, but it feels a lot more personal (hence the cringe - I can't imagine posting in public like that today). 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.
- pabs3 1y agoWhich URL is it? ArchiveBot can save it to archive.org. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
- gregjw 1y agorest in peace.
- system2 1y agoWouldn't it be more logical to move everyone to wordpress and continue as a premium hosting with support?
- jonnytran 1y agoSomebody save Kathy Sierra’s blog! https://headrush.typepad.com/ https://headrush.typepad.com/ I’ll try to archive it. I love her work. But even if I save it, it should live on somewhere else.
- pabs3 1y agoSubmitted an ArchiveBot job for it: 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 https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
- yaKashif 1y agoI run a blogging platform - Lykhari If you need to move over your typepad blog, I can help. It has a free plan as well.
- selinkocalar 1y agond of an era. Typepad was one of the first platforms that made blogging accessible to non-technical people. There's something poignant about these early web platforms shutting down. They enabled so much creativity and community building before social media centralized everything. Makes you think about platform risk. How many businesses built their entire web presence on Typepad? Now they're scrambling to migrate years of content. This is why we prioritize data portability in everything we build. You should always be able to leave.
- susiebright 1y agoJust raising my hand in bittersweet resignation — I loved my Typepad world, 16 years until it was felled by social media. 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.