In the early days of weblogging, TypePad was one of the biggies. It’s built on the Movable Type weblogging system that I was surprised to read is still in existence…proving that some old dragons never die.
However, while Movable Type still exists, TypePad is shutting down. Its early moments in the sun didn’t survive the test of time.
Unfortunately, TypePad made the shutting down immensely painful for many folk by only giving people a one month’s heads up. This means people are now scrambling to preserve their web sites.
There is no magic formula that can take what you have on TypePad and magically re-created it somewhere else. But you do have options and I’m cover a few one approach here: porting your site to a stand alone WordPress site.
First and most importantly, Export your Site
Right now, every person or organization with a TypePad web site needs to export their site to ensure they don’t lose their writing. Everything else is expendable but not the writing.
TypePad has an export feature which exports metadata, writing, and comments to a huge plain text file. If you do nothing else before September 30, do this. I would also suggest one final posting in your old TypePad space, letting folks know what’s happening and where you’ll be in the future. And then hit export.
You’ll end up with a huge text file, and that’s OK. What you can export from TypePad you can import into another system, such as the one I use: WordPress. Point of fact, I’m going to recommend a stand alone WordPress weblog because it’s probably the simplest approach for now. Getting a WordPress weblog up and running is automated in many hosts.
Setup WordPress Stand Alone
I’m focusing on a WordPress stand alone site because WordPress is one the most supported weblogging systems in use. And the software is free.
When you do create your WordPress weblog, don’t worry about looks. Don’t worry about themes. This is preservation time, you can tweak later. Just grab a theme that seems to be close to yours and worry about customizing it later.
Happily, I don’t have to write out all the bits and pieces of the migration, because Ogi Djuraskovic did a really good job of this in January. He goes into great detail about setting up a WordPress weblog in a hosted environment (Bluesky, who I can also recommend), and then importing your exported file. Best of all, he provides instructions in ensuring your images are autoloaded into your new space.
So, following his instructions, you’ll have a new WordPress weblog with writing, comments, and hopefully images. What next?
Managing Links and Domains
If you used your own domain for your site, you’ll need to access your domain registrar after you’ve created your WordPress weblog in your new space, and transfer the domain to the new IP location. Propagation is very quick nowadays and the site should show up in browsers within a day, most likely.
Now, if you used your own domain, this move may be much simpler than if you used a TypePad subdomain. If you used your own domain, you can set up your WordPress weblog to use the same URL format as you used in TypePad and any missing pages should be kept to a minimum. The same holds true if you used relative URLs rather than absolute.
Absolute URL
https://burningbird.net/about/
Relative URL
/about/
The relative URL should work in the new space as well as the old. If you used absolute URLs, and a TypePad subdomain, then you’ll need to do redirects. Ogi covered this in his excellent TypePad to WordPress how-to.
At this point, you’ve saved your writing, images, and comments. You’ve also ensured that pages won’t go missing when accessed from other pages or search engines. And your readers should be able to find you. But there is still one piece left if you want to truly preserve what you once had.
Capturing Context
No matter how much material we port, your new space won’t completely capture your old space. You can get it close, but it’s unlikely you’ll get an exact matchup between old and new.
If you have the time, and it’s worth it to you to capture the context of your old space, then you can go do what I did when I was merging all my many different weblogs over the years into Burningbird:
Include links to the Wayback Machine archives for the page.
If you look at one old time page that achieved some fame back in the glory days of weblogging, you’ll see that I have copied over both the text of the post, but not comments because I no longer have comments at Burningbird. In addition, the look and feel of the page when it was first written is different than the look and feel of my website now.
So once I merged all of my old weblog posts into Burningbird, I also included a link to the Wayback Machine entry for the post. The Wayback Machine captured an instance of time on the web, allowing us to preserve everything associated with the page at the time it was written—something no export/import tool can re-create.
This is a bit of a tedious process, but it’s also something you can do over time, when you have a spare hour or so. Start with the oldest material and work your way forward. If you don’t have older URLS, as I didn’t have, you can access the top page, such as http://weblog.burningbird.net, and then just slog through the pages.
You’re not losing anything
It’s stressful when a hosting company goes out of business and we have to scramble to find a new home. I have been through this a time or two in the past.
The important thing is to set your expectations: you’re not going to be able to completely re-create what you have now, and that’s OK: trying something new is good for the soul. And the other important thing is that you won’t be losing your writing.
The writing is what’s important. Everything else is just candy sprinkles.
