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.
In 1977 you said that computers were answers in search of questions. Has that changed?
Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s…
You’d start to teach it about yourself. And it would just keep storing all this information about you and maybe it would recognize that every Friday afternoon you like to do something special, and maybe you’d like it to help you with this routine. So about the third time it asks you: “Well, would you like me to do this for you every Friday?” You say, “Yes,” and before long it becomes an incredibly powerful helper. It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: “You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row.”
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.
My best guess is that they probably will keep the data for a few weeks/months longer for the inevitable users who forgot to archive it and/or missed the announcement.
I was thinking the same thing. "Deactivated" is different from "deleted."
I’m not a customer, but in today’s world, I would actually prefer that when the service shuts down, all accounts and published data are destroyed. Just wiped completely. Otherwise, what are the odds that customer PII gets sold off and the service owner licenses the previously hosted posts and comments to an AI company?
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.
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.
Coincidentally, and fortunately, I was already in the process of migrating a blog with 10 year’s worth of content from TypePad. It’s not enough.
TypePad’s export process is awful: the output is a poorly formatted .txt file which is hard to parse reliably. The export process itself fails at least half the time. There’s no export process for images or style files. Automated crawl processes fail.
I LOL’ed at this part of the post:
>> If you have any questions, please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions page here.
At least with LLMs, we can just write a query to migrate the export to whatever target format we want. The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.
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.
I think the progression people went trough is MoveableType > Textpattern > Kirby so if you want the “latest generation” of the simple server rendered CMS you might as well try https://getkirby.com
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.
What happened is that long form writing on the internet bifurcated into professional work and social media, and a lot of popular bloggers either became influencers or professional writers, and the 'casual' bloggers moved to social media, especially facebook. People switching to phones over computers also made reading long form text more difficult.
Blogging _seems_ like it was more popular in retrospect because for a while it was a large percentage of content _on the internet_, but the internet wasn't that popular at the time. Social media now absolutely dwarfs the size of any of the blogging sites even at their peak, and Substack and Medium are probably roughly the same size that the old blogging sites were.
Personally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life.
In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.
At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.
I don't think blogging is dead. It just moved on to different places. Non-tech majorly moved to 3rd party sites like Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, Bearblog, Substack and ghost etc. And technical Folks moatly to SSGs.
And it's not the only method anymore. We are far more connected as far as social media is concerned so it might feel like blogging is dead.
I mean, most posts I click are individual blogs here in HN. WordPress blogs kind of things just moved to 3rd party sites like medium etc I mentioned above. Hosting WordPress blogs were easier then. Now it's using Medium, Substack where you can make money as well.
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.
I have no doubt that it wasn't vc profitable, but my assumption (without any inside info) is that the real issue is that they were using some hacked up version of Movable Type that they couldn't upgrade.
It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
dazzaji|6 months ago
adt|6 months ago
In 1977 you said that computers were answers in search of questions. Has that changed?
Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s…
You’d start to teach it about yourself. And it would just keep storing all this information about you and maybe it would recognize that every Friday afternoon you like to do something special, and maybe you’d like it to help you with this routine. So about the third time it asks you: “Well, would you like me to do this for you every Friday?” You say, “Yes,” and before long it becomes an incredibly powerful helper. It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: “You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row.”
Steve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview: https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-jobs-1984-access-magazin... https://archive.md/uSuxo
pabs3|6 months ago
evanelias|6 months ago
Even so, 22 years is a good run!
jjice|6 months ago
lylo|6 months ago
tiffanyh|6 months ago
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
sandymcmurray|6 months ago
_the_inflator|6 months ago
jonnytran|6 months ago
pabs3|6 months ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
Click here if you want to help preserve all of TypePad when the DPoS starts:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
adithyassekhar|6 months ago
c0balt|6 months ago
jyunderwood|6 months ago
I’m not a customer, but in today’s world, I would actually prefer that when the service shuts down, all accounts and published data are destroyed. Just wiped completely. Otherwise, what are the odds that customer PII gets sold off and the service owner licenses the previously hosted posts and comments to an AI company?
nikcub|6 months ago
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.
pabs3|6 months ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
qq66|6 months ago
pabs3|6 months ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
jstummbillig|6 months ago
scblock|6 months ago
nonfamous|6 months ago
TypePad’s export process is awful: the output is a poorly formatted .txt file which is hard to parse reliably. The export process itself fails at least half the time. There’s no export process for images or style files. Automated crawl processes fail.
I LOL’ed at this part of the post:
>> If you have any questions, please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions page here.
The “here” link 404s.
Alex3917|6 months ago
pogue|6 months ago
pabs3|6 months ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
r0fl|6 months ago
Who would I contact?
jszymborski|6 months ago
https://www.newfold.com/
net01|6 months ago
susiebright|6 months ago
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.
Terretta|6 months ago
https://textpattern.com
petecooper|6 months ago
We're looking at how feasible it would be to do an export-import conversion:
https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=52645
omnimus|6 months ago
hombre_fatal|6 months ago
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.
empath75|6 months ago
Blogging _seems_ like it was more popular in retrospect because for a while it was a large percentage of content _on the internet_, but the internet wasn't that popular at the time. Social media now absolutely dwarfs the size of any of the blogging sites even at their peak, and Substack and Medium are probably roughly the same size that the old blogging sites were.
epc|6 months ago
In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.
At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.
unsungNovelty|6 months ago
And it's not the only method anymore. We are far more connected as far as social media is concerned so it might feel like blogging is dead.
I mean, most posts I click are individual blogs here in HN. WordPress blogs kind of things just moved to 3rd party sites like medium etc I mentioned above. Hosting WordPress blogs were easier then. Now it's using Medium, Substack where you can make money as well.
I wrote about this a while ago. Where I share a lot more links of independent blog scenes- https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
CalRobert|6 months ago
qingcharles|6 months ago
selinkocalar|6 months ago
coolgoose|6 months ago
Alex3917|6 months ago
It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
deelowe|6 months ago
BrenBarn|6 months ago
system2|6 months ago
yaKashif|6 months ago
If you need to move over your typepad blog, I can help. It has a free plan as well.
lylo|6 months ago
bookofjoe|6 months ago
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
gregjw|6 months ago