Can you remember the anticipation of counting to 60 before peeling back those Polaroid photos, juts hoping Aunt Maybelle was smiling or little Jimmy did not have his finger up his nose? The smell of the chemicals as it revealed what more often than not was not realistic colors?
Is that how we do photos in 2007?
That’s what struck me today as to what TypePad is like as a blogging platform. Ducking the tomatoes tossed in anger by the TypePad Glee Club- I know you are out there!
Seriously, I was all over MovableType, it was the shiniest blog platform.. in 2002. I ran my site in it for 2 years, cut my teeth on its templates and plugins. When it was free.
Then it went all corporate, and there was this new kid on the block. Leaner. Hipper.
But TP showed its clunkiness in a big hairball way today. The NMC has a a TypePad site with some documentation for the Pachyderm project- which I am taking to move from its static hand edited tabled laced HTML to move to a WordPress fueled site. Soon.
I know that WordPress could import TypePad blog entries (if you can get the export file- a mondo HTML file.
The first hurdle was finding we had not paid our bill in two months, and the account was suspended (bonus thumbs up to TP for not just tossing us out on the streets),. So I upped a new credit card so I could get to the sites.
Getting an export of the blog was easy.
But then, there are 90 photos storied in a TypePad Photo Album. Surely (“and stop calling my Shirley”) there was a way to export those images! Nope. Nadda. had to grab them one by one.
And iit gets worse. All of those old blog entries “exported” reference embedded images and linked document files. You’d think, as they are stored in sopme sort of file management structure, there’d be a way to export or download all of those files.
Nope.
This is the recommended method:
However, this doesn’t save a copy of all your uploaded images. To do this, you could try going to each Archive page. In your browser, go to File -> Save Page As and choose “Web page, complete.” Doing this will save each Archive page as an HTML document on your computer.
If you’ve uploaded files in your Posts, you can access these in Control Panel -> Files. Find your blog’s folder, then the “/files” folder. Right click on each file’s link and choose “Save As” to download the file to your computer.
There are literally a hundred linked files, images, etc.
Anyone there at TypePad heard of this web 2.0 thang?
Lamer-oo.
I did let them know what I thought, and at least they are filing my replies in an appropriate cannister:
Thanks for the feedback. I will pass it along to the rest of the team.
We are always looking for ways to enhance TypePad for our users, so we will keep this in mind as a possible future feature for the system.
It’s hardly mission critical, and after grabbing all of this old content, I may just abandon all hope of importing it.
But if you are in the game today, your data, your media, should not need hand tinkering to move around.
So it’s been a great ride for the tragically hip Ben and Mena, but in tis dog’s eye, TypePad is like… well… as hot as “Push”.
