Live data from Hacker News

Typepad is shutting down

everything.typepad.com

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#41
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.

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#42

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…

It still exists (Medium, etc) but the eyeballs are all on twitter, Bsky, TikTok, etc

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#44

For former MoveableType fans missing "the good old days" of CMS before headless CMS and the JAMstack took over the world, do take a look at: https://textpattern.com

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

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#46
post #7
post #2

September 30 is a pretty small window to migrate. Hopefully it's enough.

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.

It's too bad the LLMs will hallucinate and mess up the content while doing that migration.

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#47
post #7
post #2

September 30 is a pretty small window to migrate. Hopefully it's enough.

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.

> 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?

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#48

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…

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.

Re: Typepad is shutting down

#49
post #46
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's too bad the LLMs will hallucinate and mess up the content while doing that migration.

I think the best way would be to get an LLM to write a script that would export/import the data, so it only writes the code, doesn't touch the data.
Post reply on HN