After twenty-two years of writing Between the Lines on Typepad, the lights went dim with barely a month’s notice. Thirty days to pack up two decades of posts (thousands), photos, and memories. Not ideal, but it forced a long-overdue move.
Back in the early days, Typepad was amazing. It was the best blogging platform out there. Simple, powerful, and dependable. Over time, it slowed down. Typepad was bought out (by same parent as Bluehost), outages became routine, key staff disappeared, and updates stopped coming. The web evolved, but Typepad did not. I should have made the switch eight years ago. it was almost as if the new owners either didn’t care or they purposely killed it in hopes people would go to their Bluehost to host their blogs.
When Bluehost’s parent company Endurance International Group announced they were shutting Typepad down, I braced for a painful migration. Thankfully, I was not alone as there were many Autodeskers like Kean Walmsley and longtime CAD blog friends like Robin Capper in the same boat and deadline. A few “blog angels” stepped in to help, especially Jean-Yves Stervinou, who guided me through the transition and even authored updates to the WordPress Importer plugin on GitHub, now available on WordPress. Without his help, years of history might have been lost in a tangle of XML exports and broken links, or as I was thinking just be the end of 22 years blogging and quit.
Now, just over one month into hosting on WordPress.com, it feels like a breath of fresh air and endless possibilities. The flexibility, tools, and energy of the WordPress community are something Typepad lost long ago. Themes, plugins, analytics, and the open-source ecosystem make it feel like running a modern publication, not a relic from 2003. I moved any hosting I had at Bluehost away from them. They represented the Typepad problem. There was a 30 day shutdown without any support or migration paths. I would not recommend Bluehost to anyone, not even enemies.
I have always believed in community, and that is exactly what powers WordPress. It is the collective effort of thousands of developers, writers, and creators building something better together. That is the beauty of open source. You can make your corner of the internet as capable and creative as anything built by a big corporate team.
So here we are. Between the Lines is still going strong, now on new ground. Twenty-two years in, it is not just a migration. It is a reboot.
Nice, I ended up on Ghost but would not have gotten there without WordPress as it was a two-stage Typepad>WordPress>Ghost migration. Happy with Ghost too.