Farewell to Typepad

Typepad is cool. I beta-tested it, I’ve been a member since 2003. But I don’t really need it. I host my own MT blogs and there’s WordPress and so on. The blogs I set up on TP to test it suffer from neglect. Recently I was reminded of TP and went to log in only to learn that my account was in arrears. I paid for another month, but now I’m exporting the contents of my three blogs over there and will import them into two blogs over here.
The technical blog I set up over there, “Stealing Sheep,” will be imported into RFB, as it mostly consists of posts about Typepad and a few about FOAF and RDF.
The music blog, “Layer of Meta,” will become a category of wake up!, personal, journal-type weblog.
The photoblog, “Mr. Spontaneous,” will be folded into the “seen” category of the aforementioned wake up!
That is all.

About.com switching from MT to WordPress

Matt Mullenweg announces that <a title="Photo Matt

Migrating from Movable Type to TypePad

Quoting from Migration to TypePad, in which Brad De Long notes that Chuq Von Rospach is moving Teal Sunglasses and his other weblogs to TypePad:

Old Internet Mountain Man Chuq Van Rospach is moving his weblogs to Typepad:

Teal Sunglasses: blogquake! (ch-ch-ch-changes….): I’ve finally decided on what I want to do. Really — no, honest, this time I’m serious.

I’ve decided to move the blogs to Typepad.

Part of the reason to upgrade plaidworks and migrate it from in-house to a hosted solution was to stop spending all of my time working on server-level patches (maintenance, upgrades, etc, etc, etc), so I can (hopefully) focus more on content, and perhaps sleeping, or going to the gym, or… having a life. having made the decision to stop running my own server (for the first time since 1995 — we’ve had IP in the house for ten years now), I started thinking about it, and outsourcing the blogs to Typepad just seemed to make sense; it’s a major part of the system I won’t have to maintain, just like I don’t have to maintain the OS. So it simplifies my life even more. I spent some time playing with TypePad (30 day free tests are nice!) and decided I liked it.

Question: if Chuq Van Rospach is no longer maintaining his own weblog server, what business do I have maintaining one myself? Should I switch over to Typepad too?

MT to Radio to Blogger

Steven Cohen explains why he has moved his blog first from Movable Type to Radio, and now from Radio to Blogger.

[via Scripting News]

DailyKos's community blogging

DailyKos is a hugely popular left-leaning political weblog with a very active comment section. It originally ran on Movable Type but developed growing pains as the readership (and commentariat) expanded. A few months ago, Kos transitioned to Scoop, the open source codebase that underlies kuro5hin, is designed for community participation and collaborative filtering of content – essentially the group weblog model most often associated with Slashdot.
Readers have to set up a (free) account and log in with their username to comment. This creates a persistent identity and helps foster longer-term relationships emerging among the readers and writers. The diary feature enables readers to post their own thoughts and assemble their own scrapbooks of memorable information. Readers can vote a diary entry up to the front page (I believe). It’s not a bad way to start blogging with a built-in community and little expense overhead.
I’ve been reading Kos for a while, so I made sure to grab the “xian” login when he switched over to the Scoop format. Recently, though, I noticed that one’s diary is a custom URL (for example, my diary‘s address over there is xian.dailykos.com), which seemed pretty cool, so I went to my (empty) diary page there and thought it looked kind of sad.
I was reading this World o’ Crap thing on Woodruff and Dean and it made me so happy that instead of posting something to Edgewise or Oakland for Dean, I went over and posted it on the diary.
Now the funny thing is that I checked back a little while later while my diary entry was still featured in the recent sidebar on the Kos homepage, and I couldn’t help noticing that 17 people had commented on my entry. I doubt 17 people a day read my political screeds over at Edgewise.
So, I was curious about my link to WO’C. I went and looked at her referrer traffic and (as of this writing) she has 29 hits coming from that little diary entry of mine. Yes, I realize that it was a drop in the bucket for her, but it was still in the top ten of her referrers that day (currently today, 12/12). Yes, I realize she has more political writing and comedic writing talent in her little pinkie than I’ve got in my whole two thumbs, but still, I’m just saying, it’s interesting.
I think anyone contemplating starting a new blog (of the liberal persuasion) might do well to consider starting it as a diary at Kos. You’d be able to garner an audience more quickly than in many other contexts, and you could always relocate later, or shill a different site for “in-depth analysis” or whatever else yo do. You could do that here among Salon Bloggers too, though it would be nice to have some of the mechanisms of crosstalk and self-moderation built into these community weblog, collaborative media, newsfilter type things.

Migrating from Radio to iBlog

Salon blogger Gnosis has migrated from Radio to iBlog and posted an entry explaining how to manage this migration while remaining part of the Salon blogs community:

It took several days longer than I expected, but Gnosis is moved, and I’ve settled down to the sort of code tinkering that’s an ongoing process for me. A few people asked me to document what I did. There were three major steps in this process:

1. Moving existing content from the Salon server to my .mac server
2. Creating new content on my .mac server using iBlog
3. Integrating the old and new content

I’ll describe these steps as if I did everything right the first time (which I didn’t). If you want only to move your Radio UserLand Weblog to another server, step 1 will be of particular interest. If instead you want to switch from the Radio UserLand software, keep your existing content, and maintain the appearance of a single Weblog, you’ll need to pay attention to all three steps. [Gnosis]

Hooking up AmphetaDesk to Movable Type

Salon blogger Andrew Bayer has recently migrated his weblog from Radio to Movable Type, which lacks a built-in posting aggregrator. To remedy this, he has figured out a way to hook up Amphetadesk to MT. Very nice.
Andrew, did you have to hack AmphetaDesk or MT or both? Either way, please share what you’ve learned with the respective developers or user communities!

Scott Mace migrates to TypePad.

In A frustrating but pivotal blogging week, Scott Mace discusses migrating his Service Provider Blog from Radio UserLand to TypePad. An outage that prevented him from posting with Radio prompted him to make the move sooner rather than later.
Scott sat in on my Seybold seminar, so I hope our discussion of the various blog and aggregator tools proved helpful in making the decision about how to proceed.
Meanwhile, he’s rethinking his approach to blogging:

I’m rediscovering how and why I blog. I used to treat my blog as a research tool for a variety of projects. I still will, but you won’t be seeing nearly so many posts. For one thing, I’m focusing more on the big picture, instead of trying to filter so much of the news.

He’s actually not bringing all his posts over to TypePad. Scott, consider using Bill Kearney’s Exporter.root tool to get your Radio posts into the MT format.

Migration update (Blogger to MT again)

Just migrated a set of online journal entries made with Blogger in 2000 into my X-POLLEN weblog. This leaves a gap from late 2000 until January of 2002. What was I doing inbetween? Riding a dotcom all the way down, working on a novel I still haven’t finished, writing in a lot of paper journals. Maybe the occasional hiatus is normal.
Speaking of real paper journals, I passed one around tonight (last night now) at the Pie project/bloggers dinner at Hunan on Sansome in S.F., at Marc Canter’s behest. I’ll post links to the participants after I’ve slept. Plus now I have everyone’s email address, MUAHAHAHA.

Migrating from LiveJournal to Movable Type

Having migrated a weblog (this one) from Radio to Movable Type and another from Blogger Pro to Movable Type, my next migration project has been to get my old bodega weblog migrated over from LiveJournal to Movable Type, and imported into my X-POLLEN blog.
The definitive resource for LJ to MT conversion is Amanita’s explanation. I had to install a few perl modules, which I found kind of scary, but it wasn’t all the bad, and in the end I was able to get all my LJ blog entries imported (
Memory transplants). I put all the entries in a new category called bodega, but eventually I may recategorize some, or use multiple category assignments, to integrate the new/old entries more thoroughly.
Since must of bodega predated RFB, it was my main blog outlet for about six months, and it contains a lot of entries, more than any other X-POLLEN category by far.
Next I’ll be working my back through a few other online journal attempts, some more successful than others, using Blogger, Diaryland, and a hand-rolled approach I started with in 1997. The Blogger migration will be easy. It’s only about four entries and I’ve now done several Blogger-to-MT migrations.
Diaryland may be trickier. First I’ll have to see if I can export the entries at all. Then I’ll have to massage them into MT format. Same deal with the static journal: I’ll be doing some global search-and-replace to get things formatted for import.
More progress reports as I try out each step.