Posted inCurrent affairs Salem Weblogs

Les Zaitz of Salem Reporter advises “Don’t trust the media!” at City Club talk

Last Friday Les Zaitz, the editor and CEO of Salem Reporter (our town's digital-only news source), gave a talk to the Salem City Club with the surprising title, "DON'T trust the media!" But what Zaitz meant by "media" is an expanded conception that reflects the fractured media landscape now. The day is long gone when Walter Cronkite would say at the end of his evening network news program, "And that's the way it is," followed by the date of the broadcast. These days, the way it is depends on what media source you're getting news from. Fox News may have…
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Posted inWeb/Tech Weblogs

How I went wrong in verifying my domain names with the DNS option in Google Search Console

I'm not an internet neophyte. My first personal computer was an Apple II+. At least, I think that's what its name was, so much time has passed. I started using the world wide web as soon as a dial-up log in became available through the city library here in Salem, Oregon. I've been blogging since 2002, a near-eternity in internet years. But while I'm competent with using and maintaining a computer, when it comes to the technical aspects of HTML, DNS, and other acronyms whose inner workings still largely mystify me, I've got a hell of a lot to learn.…
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Posted inWeblogs

I’m a Typepad refugee. I’m enjoying my new WordPress home.

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…
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Posted inWeblogs

My migration from Typepad to WordPress is complete, thanks to Glorywebs

Today I left this 5-star Google review about my experience with Glorywebs, a tech firm based in India with a presence in the United States. After Typepad, my blogging service, announced that it was shutting down on September 30, 2025, I contacted Glorywebs for help in migrating my three blogs with 8,400 posts and 12,000 photos into the WordPress platform. In a bit more than a week Glorywebs provided me with three well-functioning WordPress blogs that have all of my exported Typepad content. The Glorywebs team was a pleasure to work with. Responsive, knowledgeable, easy to communicate with. And they…
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Posted inWeblogs

Glorywebs is a great choice if you’re migrating a blog from Typepad to WordPress

On August 27, Typepad, my long-time blogging service, announced that they're shutting down on September 30, 2025. Like lots of other Typepad bloggers, that announcement of just a window of a bit over a month to save blog content kicked off my search for expert help in migrating a large number of posts and photos from Typepad into WordPress, the premier blogging platform. I have about 8,400 posts and 10,000 photos on my three blogs, Church of the Churchless, HinesSight, and Salem Political Snark. I'm computer literate but in no way did I consider myself competent to handle this migration.…
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Posted inWeblogs

The agony and the ecstasy of Typepad, my blogging service, shutting down

The past week feels a lot like a divorce, something I experienced in 1989 when the woman I'd been married to for 18 years and I split up.  [There is supposed to be the Typepad logo here, but Typepad no longer will publish blog posts with images, at least for me, so I had to delete it.] In this current case, the split-up is between me and Typepad, the blogging service that I've used for 22 years. Just as with my first wife, the divorce was the culmination of a lengthy period in which two parties steadily grew more distant…
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Posted inWeblogs

Typepad shutting down on September 30. I’m crushed, but not surprised.

It hurts. There's no other way to say it. I've been blogging on Typepad since 2003. So when I sleepily looked at my email inbox early this morning and saw the subject line "Important Notice -- Typepad Shutdown  Announcement," I both woke up and felt distressed instantly.  I have three blogs with about 8,400 posts. My whole life, or at least my life since 2003, is reflected in those posts. Losing all that content would really bother me. This is what I told Typepad support back in March of this year, as reported in "Typepad told me they aren't going…
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Posted inWeblogs

Typepad told me they aren’t going out of business. Hope that’s true.

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…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Web/Tech Weblogs

Social media reform is needed, but the market mainly should decide

Today NBC's Meet the Press devoted its Sunday morning hour entirely to a discussion of social media: what's wrong with the way things are now on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and such, along with what needs to be done to fix those problems. It's a complicated subject with no easy answers. Here's what stuck in my mind after watching the program. Algorithms. Social media sites typically use computer algorithms to determine what gets shown to users. (Twitter is an exception, at least if a third party app is used to access Twitter, which I do. I only see tweets from…
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Posted inWeblogs

If you can’t read this blog post, it’s Typepad’s fault

I was one of the first people to start blogging with Typepad, way back in 2003 or 2004. Definitely 2004, but I sort of remember using a different blogging service in 2003, and that I copied those first posts into my HinesSight blog on Typepad when I switched to it. Now I'm super-frustrated with Typepad for the first time in those 19 or 18 years. Until now Typepad has been quite reliable. There have been brief outages when it was offline, none lasting more than half a day or so to my best recollection. However, at the moment Typepad has…
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