Typepad is shutting down

https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08/typepad-is-shutting-down.html

by gmcharlt • 11 months ago

174 92 11 months ago

everything.typepad.com

scblock2• 11 months ago

September 30 is a pretty small window to migrate. Hopefully it's enough.

Alex39173• 11 months ago

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.

_verandaguy• 11 months ago

Was this somehow not doable without LLMs? It's trivial data massaging.

cube00• 11 months ago

It's too bad the LLMs will hallucinate and mess up the content while doing that migration.

jll29• 11 months ago

The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.

That is annoying indeed - it would be nice if the Web had some way to keep links eternally valid. But people didn't even manage Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to work beyond the death of the publishing companies that issued them...

Perhaps links could be auto-replaced to archive.org links if they ceased to exist?

nonfamous• 11 months ago

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.

The “here” link 404s.

scblock2• 11 months ago

That's unfortunate. Good luck.

omg_ketchup• 11 months ago

The link has a typo. It should point to: https://help.typepad.com/shutdown-faq.html

pabs38• 11 months ago

Whats the URL? ArchiveTeam is planning on saving all the blogs to archive.org.

evanelias3• 11 months ago

They stopped accepting new users ~5 years ago, so it's hardly a surprise... but I'm still bummed to see this.

Even so, 22 years is a good run!

jjice• 11 months ago

I initially thought that the 30ish day notice was too low, but that definitely softens it.

lylo6• 11 months ago

Yeah, it's shame but perhaps they don't actually have any customers left

net01• 11 months ago

They should provide an option to move to https://ghost.org/

coolgoose• 11 months ago

Was this just not profitable? Or not vc extra growth profitable?

Alex39173• 11 months ago

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.

chipotle_coyote2• 11 months ago

Movable Type is, perhaps shockingly, still being actively developed; version 9 is coming out later this year. I’m not sure who the customer base is at this point—some years ago, they dropped the open source version and personal pricing and went to a very enterprise-ish $499/yr model—but I guess somebody is still giving them money.

tehdely2• 11 months ago

Ex-6aer here. TypePad began as a massively multiuser Movable Type but went through a full architectural transition a few years in that made it much more like a typical, scaled-out web app.

That being said, it still had as much tech debt as any other large application, not to mention being 100% Perl, which would have made sustaining engineering pretty difficult the last few years.

The biggest issue is that people have moved on from the sort of self-publishing that it made possible. Chronological blogs have been out of fashion for over a decade. I'm sad to see this happen but not surprised.

evanelias3• 11 months ago

TypePad was a separate codebase. Still Perl, but designed to be a scalable hosted SaaS / dynamic publishing platform, if I recall correctly. (I was a Six Apart employee 15 years ago, and I didn't work on the TypePad core directly, but I worked on some adjacent projects.)

As for the reasons for the shutdown, I can only speculate, but the maintenance costs for an old huge Perl codebase would likely be a factor. Also the current/final owner of TypePad is the same parent company as BlueHost, and for the past five years they've been refusing new TypePad users, and instead directing folks to BlueHost's paid WordPress hosting. So TypePad's revenue has been dropping for years by design, and consolidation of product offerings seems like the end-goal.

deelowe• 11 months ago

Does anyone read blogs anymore? Social media seems to have completely replaced them.

asa400• 11 months ago

If all you measure is "what is mainstream culture doing" then yes, social media dominates. But there are tons and tons of topics that have active bloggers, tech among them, certainly. A lot of the blogs in my RSS feed get regular updates.

Swizec• 11 months ago

Does anyone read blogs anymore?

Yes. We call them newsletters now. Podcasts, if they're audio. Many are both.

Apocryphon• 11 months ago

It's more like Medium, then Substack, have replaced the old Blogger-type services.

ireadmevs• 11 months ago

I do! And not only that, but I only read them through RSS.

bayindirh• 11 months ago

My blog’s stats show that there is a sizable readership.

Considering I also follow a few blogs, there are a silent crowd who reads blogs.

MarcelOlsz• 11 months ago

I would I just have no idea how to get everything I want to read in one place. Yeah sure RSS etc.

taude• 11 months ago

Yeup. I just went through my Feedly, currated my lists, and even started poking at some other RSS readers.

RSS is still alive, and if you're the type of person who doesn't just want the alg telling you what to look at next, then it's still valuable.

There's some many content creators right now, for example, who are specializing in sharing AI knowledge.

wrs• 11 months ago

Maybe someone can do a query of URLs posted to HN to see how many are blogs, but...it's a lot of them.

petercooper• 11 months ago

I’d make a guess almost 50% of front page posts on HN are to blog posts, so I imagine so.

FromTheArchives2• 11 months ago

I still read a ton of blogs. Try this for size:

https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

bachmeier• 11 months ago

You read blogs and scroll through social media posts. One is not a substitute for the other. So yes, I and many others still read blogs.

indigodaddy2• 11 months ago

So I've been recently just skimming through (next post -> next post etc) Kagi Smallweb and it's been a lot fun. Good way to discover new stuff easily. I actually wish they had more content though.

lylo6• 11 months ago

Yes! See https://kagi.com/smallweb and https://ooh.directory. So many good blogs!

tiffanyh• 11 months ago

Sad news.

Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.

sandymcmurray• 11 months ago

I think I used every Six Apart blogging tool and I loved Movable Type. It was a shame (for me as a user) when Ben and Mena sold the company.

_the_inflator• 11 months ago

Technorati and the rise of Wordpress.

adithyassekhar• 11 months ago

They're using the phrases "deactivated" and "not available to you" a number of times. No mentions of "delete" or "removed" on the page.

jyunderwood• 11 months ago

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?

c0balt• 11 months ago

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.

schlauerfox• 11 months ago

usually it's an asset in bankruptcy depending on the ToS contract with end users.

jstummbillig• 11 months ago

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.

qq66• 11 months ago

Lot of content here that will go down with the ship. Hope the Internet Archive will mirror it.

pabs38• 11 months ago

Click here if you want to help the preservation effort when it starts:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

Terretta• 11 months ago

For former MoveableType fans missing "the good old days" of CMS before headless CMS and the JAMstack took over the world, do take a look at:

https://textpattern.com

omnimus• 11 months ago

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

bigiain• 11 months ago

I'd bet way more people went MovableType -> Wordpress and are mostly still there.

petecooper• 11 months ago

Textpattern project person here.

We're looking at how feasible it would be to do an export-import conversion:

https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=52645

dazzaji• 11 months ago

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.

adt• 11 months ago

Steve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview:

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

pabs38• 11 months ago

Whats the URL? ArchiveTeam is planning on saving all the blogs to archive.org.

r0fl• 11 months ago

How would one go about buying typepad??

Who would I contact?

jszymborski• 11 months ago

Wiki says Newfold Digital (nee Endurance International Group) own it.

https://www.newfold.com/

MKRhere• 11 months ago

EIG? Yeah, tough luck. This all makes sense now.

hombre_fatal• 11 months ago

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.

CalRobert• 11 months ago

It still exists (Medium, etc) but the eyeballs are all on twitter, Bsky, TikTok, etc

empath75• 11 months ago

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.

epc• 11 months ago

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.

unsungNovelty• 11 months ago

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.

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...

qingcharles2• 11 months ago

I just noticed they own blogs.com domain. That would have been worth a pretty penny at some point, maybe not as much now.

lylo6• 11 months ago

Is anyone here affected by this? I'd be surprised but I'm curious

bookofjoe6• 11 months ago

Me. I've been on Typepad since I started my blog in 2004. Even though it's clunky I've been able to use it for 21+ years.

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

bookofjoe6• 11 months ago

first Ghost post: https://bookofjoe.ghost.io/

pabs38• 11 months ago

Guess that is https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/ - adding it to the ArchiveTeam list of blogs to save.

lylo6• 11 months ago

Wow that's an incredible amount of views. And an incredible shame at the same time.

If you want to try out my app Pagecord (https://pagecord.com) I'd happily try and help you migrate over.

Biggest problem is the death of the *.typepad.com domain though. I wonder if they'd be willing to add 301 redirects for a year or three? One can hope...

pogue• 11 months ago

Someone page Archive Team! https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page

pabs38• 11 months ago

On their radar already, a Distributed Preservation of Service project is being looked into. Prepare your warriors!

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

BrenBarn• 11 months ago

Sad to see a venerable blogging platform bite the dust. I never used it but do stumble across typepad blogs from time to time.

nikcub• 11 months ago

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.

pabs38• 11 months ago

Which URL is it? ArchiveBot can save it to archive.org.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot

gregjw• 11 months ago

rest in peace.

system2• 11 months ago

Wouldn't it be more logical to move everyone to wordpress and continue as a premium hosting with support?

jonnytran• 11 months ago

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.

pabs38• 11 months ago

Submitted an ArchiveBot job for it:

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

yaKashif• 11 months ago

I run a blogging platform - Lykhari

If you need to move over your typepad blog, I can help. It has a free plan as well.

selinkocalar• 11 months ago

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.

susiebright• 11 months ago

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.

Typepad is shutting down

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