Kind 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.
Wow - 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.
Does 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.
Just 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.
Somebody save Kathy Sierra’s blog! 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.
nd 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.
Just 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.
26 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 50.5 ms ] threadEven so, 22 years is a good run!
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
https://textpattern.com
We're looking at how feasible it would be to do an export-import conversion:
https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=52645
Who would I contact?
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.
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
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.
If you need to move over your typepad blog, I can help. It has a free plan as well.
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.