I've been blogging with Typepad since 2003, which is when Wikipedia says Typepad launched. So I must have been one of their earliest customers. Now I have three Typepad blogs.
So while I've gotten used to fairly frequent Typepad outages as problems with the blogging service have become more common, when I couldn't log in to my account on March 3, I got more concerned than usual.
Even though things were back to normal by the next day (which for Typepad is still pretty crappy, especially when it comes to uploading photos, as this person complained about in 2022), I felt the need to send Typepad a support ticket that said:
The Typepad outage yesterday spurred me to do some Googling about Typepad. I saw that you haven't accepted new customers since 2020 and may not be in business much longer. Hopefully that isn't true.
But if it is, I sure hope you guys will have a plan for those of us who have been with Typepad almost from the start, 2003. In those 22 years I've made about 8,300 posts on my three blogs. It's just overwhelming for me to think about losing all that content, which includes many personal experiences, since I partly use blogging as a form of a diary.
So I've got posts about deaths in the family, my granddaughter's birth, health problems, joys and sorrows, all that stuff. It's all under a Typepad URL, so if you go away, so does my ability to retrieve those posts.
I'm simply asking what I hope you're already planning to do in case Typepad goes out of business. Please seriously consider a plan to keep the posts of people like me available. I'm not computer savvy enough to know what this might be. I just know that I'd be willing to pay more to preserve that content, as I'm confident other Typepad users would be.
The response I got made me feel better, though it wasn't totally reassuring.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your message. Although Typepad is no longer accepting new sign-ups, we continue to support our existing customers and there are no plans for that to change. If it were to change at some point, there would likely be a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform. However, as mentioned, there is no plan at this time to shut down Typepad, and the Support team are still here for you.
Thanks,
Laura
I replied with:
Laura, thanks much for your positive response. I feel better now. The notion of a tool to help us bloggers migrate to another platform sounds great. Seems like that would benefit both the other platform (new customers!) and Typepad bloggers (no need to get degree in computer science!). Hopefully it won't come to that. I feel a large sense of gratitude to Typepad for sticking around since 2003, which I like to refer to as several hundred years in Internet Years, given the rapidity of change since that time. Of course, that's when I began blogging, which makes me a several hundred year old blogger -- a bit more than my actual ancient age of 76.
Quite a while ago, maybe as many as ten years, I looked into converting my many thousands of blog posts into a WordPress format. It turned out that this would be very difficult to do, if not impossible, so I gave up on that idea.
This helps explain why I felt so good about Typepad support saying they hope to offer a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform if it came to that. I'd hate to lose not only the text of my posts, but also all of the photos, files, comments, and such that have been part of my 8,300 posts.
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