It’s got all the makings of a tragedy. A man — let’s call him me, because that’s who he is — finds a blogging home at Typepad in 2003 after briefly trying another platform and finding it lacking.
For about two decades Typepad and I got along fine. They took my annual fee. I found their services likable, albeit lacking in some features I wanted, such as the ability for visitors to edit comments they left on what eventually became three blogs.
Then our relationship took a downturn. In 2020 Typepad stopped accepting new customers. Not a good sign. Rumors were spreading that Typepad was going out of business. The platform became increasingly buggy. It would go offline for hours or even days. Photos were very difficult to insert into a post.
In March of this year I asked Typepad support if they were going to shut down. I was told “there is no plan at this time to shut down Typepad.” Well, on August 27 that time came. After 22 years of togetherness, Typepad was leaving me. The breakup hurt.
But sometimes cliches are true, as in All’s well that ends well.
I was fortunate, thanks to the Great God Google, to put myself into the competent hands of Glorywebs, a tech firm based in India that handled the migration of my 8,400 blog posts, tens of thousands of comments, and 12,000 images into three new WordPress blogs hosted by Bluehost.
The process went so well, I made a video praising Glorywebs. This was a big deal for me, since one of my key strategies for feeling good about my age is to stand as far away as possible from mirrors and other reflecting surfaces, so seeing myself in all my senior citizen glory in this video was Too Much Reality. Glorywebs appreciated it, though, which made the video worthwhile.
This is my one-week anniversary of starting to blog on the WordPress platform. I’m liking it. A lot. As I said in The agony and the ecstasy of Typepad, my blogging service, shutting down:
To throw in a metaphor that appeals to my 76 year old male mind, though probably not to my wife’s psyche, WordPress feels like a gorgeous young trophy wife who will be a pleasure to be with after splitting up with a decidedly over-the-hill Typepad who had stopped being fun years ago.
It’s amazingly refreshing to be able to write blog posts on WordPress, which simply works. Yes, that’s a low bar. But Typepad failed to meet it for years. Not surprisingly, at first I felt kind of overwhelmed by having to learn how WordPress functions. WordPress: The Missing Manual helped introduce me to my new blogging partner.
Already I’m feeling much more comfortable in my new WordPress home. I even figured out how to get backups for my three blogs. After looking into various backup plugins from outside sources, I settled on the WordPress offering, VaultPress Backup. I ended up with the core plugin version, not the non-core version, because I wanted some free extras that WordPress support staff told me only are available with the core version. It backs up everything: full backups, incremental backups, even real-time backups of new posts and comments. And all that is stored on its own servers, so I don’t have to sign up for a cloud server.
I don’t totally understand the difference between the core and non-core versions of VaultPress Backup. One difference is that the core version is centered on the WordPress site, rather than being a plugin on the Bluehost site where I use WordPress. I do know that today I added the feature under each blog post which allows visitors to sign up for email notifications when a new post is published. Visitors can also get a notice when new comments on a post appear.
The next big moment in my WordPress relationship will come on September 30, when Typepad shuts down for good. I’m actually looking forward to that, because on the advice of the Glorywebs SEO (Search Engine Optimization) team, I’ve paused the ability of search engines to find my new WordPress blogs. I’d asked for their advice about this after remembering that when I switched to Typepad from another platform in 2003, there were duplicate blog posts on the two platforms after I’d copied in posts to Typepad from the other platform.
That caused my Google rankings to drop precipitously. Apparently Google didn’t like finding two copies of the same posts in different places on the Internet. That’s why I’m holding off on giving search engines access to my blogs until Typepad shuts down and my 8,400 posts with a Typepad URL aren’t accessible, and the migrated WordPress posts are.
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