Pretty heads down at WordCamp US, which has had amazing energy and talks so far. I wanted to take a moment to note two things, first being a great essay from Dave Winer asking people to Think Different about WordPress.
I’ve done this before — asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said “we don’t do that.” They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.
And in light of the news of Typepad shutting down, note that WordPress has a Typepad importer. A big advantage of putting your content into an open source platform like WordPress with an active community, vs just static pages or something custom, is that you’re getting constant upgrades “for free” as we maintain and iterate on the software, enabling new APIs or things like allowing your AI to talk to your site.
WordPress is built by a community of people deeply passionate about backwards and forward compatibility, radical openness so it’s easy to get things in and out of it, and relentless iteration building for the long term. Despite literally billions of dollars spent trying to kill or crush WordPress, and frequent proclamations of its death, we keep trucking along and doing our darndest to make the web a bit more open and free every day. It’s a life mission of many people, including myself.
When the author moves, their content moves with them. And if they own the domain, everything just works. WordPress do makes that kind of openness possible.
I just found out that Typepad is shutting down from this post. Typepad remains an important part of blogging history. Many of its active users will surely feel sad and disappointed. Hopefully, they can make good use of the migration features to WordPress. I had used their paid service for a year before switching to Blogger with a custom domain, and now I’m on WordPress.
The shutdown is not really a surprise, though, as Typepad hasn’t accepted new sign-up for several years.
If you come over to WordPress.com we’ll do our best to provide a great home online for the long term, we even offer a hundred year plan: https://wordpress.com/100-year/
Dotcom has been the Noah’s Ark for so many bloggers whose platform went under the waves. So I was rather surprised not to find a support guide about Typepad import. Searching docs brought up 0 results, but the importer is there in the wpadmin dashboard.
Thank you for noticing this gap, JenT. I have gone ahead and created a basic support doc for this:
https://wordpress.com/support/import/import-from-movable-type-and-typepad/
> Dotcom has been the Noah’s Ark for so many bloggers whose platform went under the waves.
So much of this ♡
Awesome! Thanks. Just shared it in the dotcom forums. 🙂