The year of the switch

Apparently, 2005 is the year of the switch for me. From PC to Apple and from TypePad to Wordpress. Enough folks have asked, that I’m feeling compelled to write a brief explanation of why I’m switching from Typepad to Wordpress. But let’s get this straight: I’m still a fan of Six Apart. They make good software that I have used and enjoyed. In fact, I’ll continue to use and enjoy their software over at AllBusiness.com.

And next, a little history. I used Movable Type back when the Trotts were working out of a garage or living room or something. Like a lot of folks, I ditched it when they became a real company and later announced their pricing structure. At that time I had a single installation over at pintglass.org and a bunch of friends and I were each keeping a blog. Our usage was fine but we could never upgrade without paying for it and we just weren’t that serious about it. So we switched to individual installations of Wordpress. Since then, I’ve used WP for a bunch of different projects. I’ve also messed around with a lot of other software that can be used for blogging like Blosxom, Mambo, Textpattern, Blogger, Drupal and so on. Wordpress is easy for my brain to understand.

Despite all my experience with various packages, when I began this blog I decided to go with Typepad. My decision pretty much revolved around these two things: I liked Six Apart, based on my previous MT experience; and I wanted the relative simplicity of a hosted package, but with power features. TypePad fit the bill nicely.

There was a brief learning curve with getting the domain redirected, but then I was off and running. TypePad lets you mess with custom templates, so I could screw things up to my heart’s content. TypePad also has these “TypeList” thingies that provide a lot of extra functionality. It worked pretty well for me.

This isn’t to say there weren’t frustrations. The app is a bit slow. Many changes require “rebuilding” things and that takes time. The built-in statistics leave much to be desired. Though you can upload files, you can’t really extend the functionality much beyond what’s offered. Javascript pieces will do a lot, but when you’ve got JS looking all over the web for various bits and pieces, page loading can get slow. I also had a small handful of customer service questions. Some were answered quickly and correctly. Others weren’t. A little annoying, but whatever. I get the same experience at my local hardware store. And, just as at the hardware store, I generally found my own answers.

A few weeks ago, TypePad recognized that the application had been pretty sluggish. They had a good reason for that, but even so, they offered up a menu of free choices to extend your service. One of the choices was “No thanks”, which is what I chose. I really wasn’t so inconvenienced as to feel justified taking the offer. I was still a fan, though wavering at that point. Mainly because I longed for additional “plug-in” type functionality that TP couldn’t provide.

A couple of weeks after that, I got an email from TypePad advising me to change the way my domain was pointing to their servers. I dutifully followed the instructions. The result was that many of the links to this blog stopped working. Any link that began with “http://slackermanager.com” didn’t work. If you put a “www.” after the two slashes, it worked fine. It took a few back and forth emails over the course of a couple of days, but the answer was that my registrar, Pairnic.com (a little spendy, but a really great registrar), does things a little differently and I should change my settings back to the way they were. I did that and everything was better. A week later I got another email telling me to make changes to another domain that pointed here. No mention of the Pairnic exception. I used Pairnic.com at Typepad’s recommendation when I started the blog.

So all of that stuff combined was pretty much the impetus for moving to Wordpress. I want more flexibility, and I don’t mind doing my own customer service. It’s also portable. If my hosting company goes all sideways, I can just pack it up and move elsewhere with ease. Using hosted blog services means your application and your hosting are tied together. That’s okay, provided you’re willing to live with both the upside and the downside of such an arrangement. For me, the downside eventually grew heavier than the upside and it was time to move on.

On that note, I’ll say that it’s really easy to get my posts and comments out of Typepad. It’s much tougher to get it out of Typepad and into Wordpress in a manner that won’t break nearly every existing link that’s out on the web. And that’s where I’m currently stuck. Anybody knows how to export from Typepad so that the import into Wordpress will create identical post URL’s, I’m all ears (so to speak). I know about .htaccess tricks, but that’ll only get me so far. Here’s an example: the recent del.icio.us post has this URL in Typepad: ...the_several_hab.html. When I export that to Wordpress, the new URL is ...the-several-habits-of-wildly-successful-delicious-users/. Typepad truncates the title for the post URL, Wordpress just uses the whole title. I’m not sure how to deal with that. Any and all suggestions are welcomed.

Also, for what it’s worth, I know I could load up Movable Type and use that and the posts would probably come through flawlessly. I’m heavily swayed by Wordpress’s very active developer community, though. It reminds me of what Movable Type’s community was like, back in the day. Also, my host does this cool one-click install of the latest WP version, so it was painless. In all honesty, if it was that easy to install Movable Type I’d probably be testing out both of them right now.