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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Small nit, I worked on TypePad directly and it was very influenced by Moveable Type (and maybe some copied code) but it wasn't an instance of Moveable Type. E.g. there was never a time where you could patch TypePad with a MoveableType update. The architecture transition was primarily to stop rebuilding pages after every edit, but that also ended up being a good excuse to try to clean up a bunch of other things too.
100% correct, and there's no way I could possibly "well ackshyually" you on this, Garth.
I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.
I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.
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.
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
Even so, 22 years is a good run!
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
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.
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?
Who would I contact?
https://www.newfold.com/
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.
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?
https://textpattern.com
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.
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.
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.
It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
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.
$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.
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.
I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.
I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.
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.
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.