I’m moving my Blog from TypePad to WordPress
After almost 6 years I am looking at moving my blog over to WordPress from TypePad.com. I feel TypePad is always a little behind the curve in functionality. It took them a while before they supported Pages. They do not support category/label feeds unless you have a Pro account and you have to jump through some hoops to make it work even then.
I’ve been using FaceBook lately and was excited to learn that I could get FaceBook to automatically pull in as notes, my blog posts. I really only want to pull in general posts and not my geeky programming posts which is why I really want to be able to specify a category feed. I think this is something TypePad should include in my Plus account which I pay $71.60 per year. Other services offer it for free and you don’t have to do anything, the feeds are just there!
The last straw was when I contacted TypePad support to share my views on this and got a less than satisfactory response. Their support has always been pretty good though the answers were often unsatisfactory (we don’t support that, maybe one day). I stated I felt the category feeds should be a basic feature and they replied they would be happy to pass my note on to their engineers for suggestions on future improvements. This isn’t an improvement, it is a sales/marketing issue. Yeah, I’m just starting to feel like a number with them and feeling I can actually get a better product with an opensource solution!
My hosting service LunarPages, which I love, offers to install WordPress for free which I did and I was able to import my TypePad blog without issue. I’m not done yet, and I still have a bit of work to do but I think I’m going to be happy with the switch. I never did set the domain mapping in TypePad so I have more work to fix all the links and links to images.
TypePad doesn’t offer FTP publishing which Blogger offers. I don’t feel like I truly have control of my own content, until now!
Here are some useful links: