by liberal japonicus
from https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08/typepad-is-shutting-down.html
Typepad is shutting down
August 27, 2025We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025.
What Does This Mean for You?
After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.
Please note that after this date, you will no longer be able to access or export any blog content.
Discuss
Speaking (obviously) from a position of total ignorance, I’m nonetheless hoping that all the work Michael did before, when Typepad was going through a particularly erratic phase, means we don’t have to lose our whole history. I feel (and I bet I’m not alone) that losing ObWi altogether would be a very sad loss. Clearly, moving us somewhere else will mean a lot of work for somebody who knows how to do it – is there anything the rest of us can do to help?
First up: What alternative platforms are there? What are their strengths and weaknesses? FYI, both obsidianwings.org and obsidianwings.com appear to be available. So, if we get some blogging software, we can create our own website and run it there. Just a thought.
Second: how do we migrate to whatever new platform we (probably meaning lj) decide on? I believe Michael Cain has already worked out how to back up our past posts and comments. Perhaps he has some insights and advice on the transition.
Third: Is there anything we can do to alert long time but infrequent users as to what is happening and where we are going? Maybe a way to strip email addresses from a couple of decades of comments? Granted, it’s a “nice to have” but it would be nice.
If whatever new platform we end up on charges, who pays for it? If we create our own site, the annual registration isn’t that much. But if we go again with a commercial platform it might be.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
Michael is the go-to person, but…
Porting Typepad to WordPress Easily
My initial opinion is that moving ObWi to a WordPress site is straightforward. That’s not necessarily the same as either simple or easy. I’ll write something more detailed in the morning for people to pick at.
One possible path might be to export the current site to a blog that doesn’t update, making it an archive, and starting a new blog that we could set up in the most efficient way. That way, we could deal with the deadline and get an archive up later.
Priority item from my perspective… Verify the Typepad export function still works. Last time around, the Typepad update that fixed export broke my code that had scraped the site contents the hard way. If the export function is broken again, fix my code and scrape content newer than what I got previously. Once that’s done, retrieve any images hosted by Typepad that are newer than my last checkpoint. Once there’s a safe copy of the content, the rest is just details :^) I’ll take on this task and let select people know when I have put a copy in a public place.
Don’t have anything of value to add to the discussion except that I’m glad y’all are handling this.
Please, ye Gods of Tech (hi, Michael), save Obsidian Wings. After 18 years here, I would miss it terribly.
I don’t have the foggiest on how it works, but if it costs money to grab the ObsidianWings.com and/or .org domain names, I’d happily chip in. But I leave it to you whether that’s worthwhile.
FWIW, if you compile an email list I would gladly share my email address with anyone who cares to share theirs.
–TP
What TonyP said, in every respect.
If it helps, I’d be happy to pay for a domain name, and hosting, for as long as I live.
Er… I’m one of those longtime readers, but infrequent commenters. This is awful news, and I do hope ObiWi can migrate. I have no tech skills whatsoever to offer, but would be happy to kick in some expense money.
Ditto to all who are willing to contribute to ongoing expenses for new site.
I will gladly contribute from the large chest of doubloons I recently discovered in a shipwreck at the bottom of Horse Pond Bay, which is only ten feet deep. It’s hard to believe no one got to it before me.
Michael: as well as being a God of Tech, you are now officially an influencer. I have returned new pillows 1 and 2, and am about to order a buckwheat husk pillow. Fingers crossed.
…and am about to order a buckwheat husk pillow.
This is the brand I got most recently. There was a very faint dried plant material sort of odor for a few days. On the higher end price for a pillow, but I expect to use it for >10 years.
That pillow is £136 to order here, and cannot be dispatched for 6 – 7 months! And it looks like our standard size pillows (i.e. which will fit normal UK pillow cases) are a bit smaller, 27.16 inch x 16.92inch versus your 20 x 26 inch. But I think the important thing is the weight of the hulls, the one I am thinking of (as well as being cheaper – around $50) seems to have very good reviews, and says it has 9.25 lbs of hulls in it, versus your one which has 9.75 lbs. In all other respects this one looks pretty good (i.e. with zip so you can add or subtract husks, organic etc etc), so I reckon I will go with this one as a trial, and if it only lasts a couple of years so be it, and I will order again.
Since there are a number of readers interested…
Typepad’s export function appears to be broken, at least for content as large as Obsidian Wings’. I have updated my software for scraping the site content the hard way — Typepad added more stuff to discourage scraping. I’ve updated my site archive to this morning and put a copy up in the cloud where the editors can access it. There may be some hiccups, but this was (imo) the critical step to preserve the site’s history.
I admit to a certain amount of curiosity about how many other long-running blogs there may be for whom the export function is broken, who don’t have access to a stubborn old software guy?
Thanks Michael. Back in the day they would have worked with WordPress to migrate anyone that chose to move There was a certain sensitivity to just killing people’s content.
I am curious, I will look later, to see if anyone is offering migration. Or maybe blogs are just not a big deal anymore.
Back in the day they would have worked with WordPress to migrate anyone that chose to move There was a certain sensitivity to just killing people’s content…. I am curious, I will look later, to see if anyone is offering migration.
GoDaddy, where I rent my domain and cloud server, offers to migrate sites from other platforms to WordPress for a fee. GoDaddy will do pretty much anything for a fee :^)
Typepad.com hasn’t signed up new customers for Moveable Type sites for five years now. Two years ago, they came close to shutting down the Moveable Type service. I seem to recall from then that they offered to migrate people to a WordPress service under the same corporate umbrella. Guess they’re on the “well, we warned you” plan this time.
I tested the WordPress import function against a subset of my archive today, and it worked fine. I think we’re down to where it’s just going to be tedious now.
Should we be commenting as little as possible to keep your newest version up to date before we find out where we are migrating to, Michael? (Or does this make zero sense, which would be unsurprising given my ignorance of this whole subject?)
Here’s the current rough plan
-Going to set up a new site with wordpress after I finish a conference presentation next weekend.
-We will make a second archive site with all the old content, but not be interactive in anyway.
After the new site is up, I’ll copy any posts that we make at either site to both sites. The posts here will have the comments closed and a note to go to the new site, so anything going up in the last half of sept will be here, but you’ll need to go to the new site to comment.
This way, we can get the site up and not rush migrating the old data, as well as avoiding the problems of integrating everything. This means that we might lose the last few comments here, but this seems like the least fuss. We could also go back and import some key posts or link to them on the front page. I’m thinking particularly of Andrew’s last post, but there may be other important ones we want to bring forward.
Also, thanks for all the generous offers of financial support, but it is more of a pain dealing with the problems of international money transfer (along with the added scrutiny, believe it or not), but when I get the site up, I will ask regular commenters to consider making a post with their favorite topic or their introduction/interesting story to populate the blog with some content and discussion. It’s not required, but it will be helpful.
Just a thought, that if the archive site is also WordPress, all WP sites require some amount of ongoing maintenance even if the content doesn’t. That’s just the way WP has set things up. At some point, one or more of the WP version, the PHP version, the theme version, or the widgets version will get out of whack and the site will just stop running.
Each of the long-running blogs I follow that run on WP eventually puts up a post saying, “We have to upgrade. Sh*t will be broken.”
WP’s current import function appears to be robust enough that loading the old content is just tedious, not difficult. And can be done after the new site is running.
GftNC, updating my archive takes minutes and can be done right up until Typepad shuts the servers down. No real reason to stop posting and/or commenting yet. Most convenient timing might be when lj decides he’s ready to move the last several posts and comments to the new site; I can update my archive and provide him with a file with those posts/comments that WP will import.
Barely on topic:
I have been remiss. I just went and discovered that we had stuff in the Spam folder dating back to June! I have, for what little it is worth, cleared that up. Apologies to Charles, russell, Hartmut, GftNC, etc.
Hoping to do better going forward (wherever we go)
lj: thanks for the update. Sounds good.
Michael: thanks! Also, buckwheat pillow arriving tomorrow – here’s hoping.
wj: whenever anything of mine goes into spam, if it’s important I always post a request for retrieval here, so no need for apology to me!
Spam filters are part of each hosting service’s “secret sauce”. Wherever we end up, I can pretty much guarantee that legitimate comments will still go into spam, but for a different set of unknown reasons.
If AI was real and ready for prime time, spam filters would work a whole lot better than they demonstrably do.
If AI was real and ready for prime time, 95% of the spam would come from AI.
You know it’s true.
So, adversarial AI training, out in the wild. What could possibly go wrong?
By the way, I should have said: I very strongly support the continued front-paging of the Andrew Olmsted stuff. Even though I first started reading after his time (probably 2008 – hilzoy was still around for quite a while) I read every single thread about him that the front page memorialises, and it seemed (and seems) to me that he, what he represented and the relationship that e.g. hilzoy in particular had with him, was a clue to the intrinsic character of the best of ObWi. So that would be my vote, FWIW.
GftNC, most of the Olmsted links are dead, or will be come Sep 30. Some maintenance will be required.
Looks like most of Andrew’s stuff can at least be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Maybe change the links to Archive permalinks?
Woot!!! We made it!!
Huge props to Michael Cain especially, also to wj, LJ, and Janie for making this happen.
Thank you all!!
Hallelujah! So many thanks to Michael, lj, Janie and anybody else who was involved. Days without a check in to ObWi felt weird – I’m so very glad it’s back!