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 · 1h ago
I initially thought that the 30ish day notice was too low, but that definitely softens it.
r0fl · 10m ago
How would one go about buying typepad??
Who would I contact?
dazzaji · 15m 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.
tiffanyh · 1h ago
Sad news.
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
hombre_fatal · 6m 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 · 5m ago
It still exists (Medium, etc) but the eyeballs are all on twitter, Bsky, TikTok, etc
scblock · 2h ago
September 30 is a pretty small window to migrate. Hopefully it's enough.
Alex3917 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Was this somehow not doable without LLMs? It's trivial data massaging.
Alex3917 · 15m ago
I mean with LLMs you just copy-paste in the input format of your new CMS and then upload your export file. Even if it only took 15 minutes before, it now takes 0 minutes.
Terretta · 24m 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:
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 · 1h 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?
jstummbillig · 1h 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.
Lot of content here that will go down with the ship. Hope the Internet Archive will mirror it.
coolgoose · 2h ago
Was this just not profitable? Or not vc extra growth profitable?
Alex3917 · 1h 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_coyote · 1h 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.
evanelias · 45m ago
My understanding is that Movable Type remained hugely popular in Japan, even as WordPress overtook it elsewhere.
throw0101a · 1h ago
> very enterprise-ish $499/yr model
$500 ÷ 12 = 41.67 per month.
For a personal/fun publishing platform that might be a bit pricey, but that's less than what many people pay for their cell phone plan.
chipotle_coyote · 56m ago
That’s fair; it just makes it pretty steep at the low end compared to many other hosted solutions like Ghost, WordPress, or Squarespace. It gives the strong impression that they’re not looking for new customers as much as trying to keep existing commercial ones on board for as long as possible.
evanelias · 33m 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.
tehdely · 36m 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.
deelowe · 1h ago
Does anyone read blogs anymore? Social media seems to have completely replaced them.
asa400 · 1h 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.
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.
Swizec · 1h ago
> Does anyone read blogs anymore?
Yes. We call them newsletters now. Podcasts, if they're audio. Many are both.
No comments yet
petercooper · 1h ago
I’d make a guess almost 50% of front page posts on HN are to blog posts, so I imagine so.
ireadmevs · 1h ago
I do! And not only that, but I only read them through RSS.
taude · 1h 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.
bachmeier · 1h 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.
bayindirh · 1h 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.
wrs · 1h 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.
MarcelOlsz · 1h ago
I would I just have no idea how to get everything I want to read in one place. Yeah sure RSS etc.
Apocryphon · 1h ago
It's more like Medium, then Substack, have replaced the old Blogger-type services.
Even so, 22 years is a good run!
Who would I contact?
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
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.
https://textpattern.com
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?
It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
$500 ÷ 12 = 41.67 per month.
For a personal/fun publishing platform that might be a bit pricey, but that's less than what many people pay for their cell phone plan.
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.
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.
https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs
https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/br-8da940...
Yes. We call them newsletters now. Podcasts, if they're audio. Many are both.
No comments yet
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.
Considering I also follow a few blogs, there are a silent crowd who reads blogs.