If you are interested, let me know and we can set up a private blog on WordPress.com for you to import into. Bonus is that you will have a backup of your blog ready to go live if anything ever befalls TypePad.

This importer wouldn’t be possible without the heroic effort Ronald Heft Jr put into creating a TypePad AtomPub importer for WordPress — it’s not his fault TypePad still doesn’t have a way to export your full blog.

What’s an AtomPub? While working on this importer Noel contacted TypePad support only to have them tell him they don’t know what AtomPub is, and that they don’t support it.

Anyway, as I said, if you are a TypePad customer, and want to participate in open source development by testing this exporter, or would just like a backup of your blog ready to launch on WordPress.com, leave a comment or send me an email.

There are a couple of things immediately apparent from David’s tweat:

1. He has never exported a blog from TypePad
2. He has never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Never exported a blog from TypePad

I know this because I’ve done numerous TypePad exports and also working through my customers trying to get support from Six Apart in the export. For most TypePad blogs, it’s impossible to truly export the blog. Six Apart provides no tools or documentation on how to export in a way that preserves the permalinks, and because of a bug in TypePad and an unpublished permalink creation rules that have changed over the years, it guarantees a tedious, manual process to truly export the blog.

About a year ago, I approached members of the Six Apart leadership team in the hopes that they would commit to fix this issue. I was really nice back then and the whole time until recently. Now, I’ve concluded they were playing games.

Six Apart CEO Christopher Alden’s even promised “A Bright New TypePad in 2008“, “TypePad is the only blogging service that gives you complete ownership of your blog”. Appreciate the humor of that? You are trapped on TypePad.

Chris, and all the leadership team will wave their hands, “AtomPub is the answer.”

Never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Having tried to guide Ronald Heft Jr in creating AtomPub exporters for TypePad and Movable Type, my only conclusion is that no member of Six Apart has written a blog exporter using AtomPub.

Six Apart VP Anil Dash likes to brag about them having helped create Atom and AtomPub. An exporter would have been one of the perfect real world applications to create as part of the creation of the specification. And wouldn’t you think if they were going to tell everyone that is the solution to exporting from TypePad that they would have built such an exporter? They couldn’t have because you can’t without hacking around AtomPub, a lot, which is what Ronald has done.

Then as we had it working, hacks and all, this past weekend, TypePad changed it, fixing one aspect of their AtomPub (drafts are identified), changing a few things that we can adjust to (changed the URL endpoints, switched to MT tag names for consistentency), but also breaking our importer:

• Can no longer retrieve comments on posts.
• No longer contains Pages.
• XML-RPC for trackback retrieval broke.

These issues have been reported to Six Apart and hopefully they will be fixed soon, but there is absolutely zero transparency. There is no way for us to check on the status of these issues.  Wouldn’t you expect the changes to be documented on the “The Official Everything TypePad weblog” and mentioned on “Six Apart Status“?

I cringe to think of the mess it would have been if we had already included the TypePad AtomPub importer in a release.

It seems that independent developers are left out in the cold.

The open web starts at home

Although, I’m excited by the work Ronald is doing, should it really be necessary for TypePad customers to come to the WordPress community to export their blogs?

I’m reminded of Dave Winer’s excellent article “How to do data portability” which includes “The best way to achieve data portability is to just do it”. That article really moved me, data portability, and by extension the open web, starts at your own company, on your own product.

How much longer do TypePad customers have to wait before they can export their blog?

Google Summer of Code is an amazing opportunity. First, it is a great opportunity to interact with two of open source’s finest Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona. Their whole team of Googlers is amazing. But more important is the opportunity to enable university students to spend their summer of working on open source projects, mostly WordPress in our case, and for the students to make a little coin in the process.

Last year was our first year participated in Google Summer of Code. Overall, I think our participation was a great success with 10 students getting experience working on open source software. Five of them are still active in the WordPress world. I think we can do much better this year.

Thanks to my friend Ronald Heft Jr’s reminder to wp-hackers that it GSoC was about to start, we are already ahead of where we were last year. If WordPress is accepted, Ronald plans on applying again as a student, and another regular participant, Jacob Santos, also has been sharing project proposals on the wp-hackers mailing list.

Matt and I sat down — virtually, of course — and reflected on the good results from last year, and the awesome opportunities for everyone involved to have an even better experience this year.

The Automattic family has grown, and through my gentle persuasion, we have more mentors. We also have two more community members more than last year. Some of these WordPress aficionados will be co-mentors or backup mentors, so that the students benefit from more, direct collaboration. Matt will also be acting as a meta-mentor, a mentor’s mentor. You can see a lot of the other details that we came up with in our application below.

Another exciting development is another organization that greatly contributes to and benefits from WordPress will be using company time to mentor students, b5media. Aaron Brazell, Mark Jaquith, and Brian Layman (all familar names to WordPress participants) have proposed Integrated Caching Solutions with Mark and Brian co-mentoring.

Does your organization get a lot out of WordPress? It’s not too late to contact me about members of your team getting more out of the open source experiencing by mentoring as part of WordPress’ application to Google Summer of Code.

Here is the application that I submitted:

About Your Organization

3. Describe your organization.

WordPress is the most popular open source “state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” (blogging software).

Matt Mullenweg and fellow WordPress developers founded Automattic to be able to work on WordPress full-time, provide a WordPress.com service, and other open source software products and services. I am employed by Automattic.

4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Why: Google provides this awesome opportunity for students to get paid to work on open source. WordPress is a huge open source success story. Students should have the opportunity to work on WordPress!

What: an opportunity for current student contributors to be able to focus on WordPress this summer, but mostly for new contributors to WordPress to get exposure to open source development, and our mentors having awesome experiences.

5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional)

This is an important question. We participated for the first time last year, and we have identified a number of ways that we will make it even better:
* Have an application template. Last year we took for granted what was essential for a successful application.
* Applicants must also post their application on a WordPress powered blog. Last year we had quite a few applicants without basic understanding of WordPress.
* More mentors, having backup mentors, and a mentor’s mentor. No mentor will be allowed to take on more than 1 project no matter how much they are passionate about multiple projects.
* Mentors having to provide status updates as well every 2nd week (students every week)
* As students reach the major milestones of their project that they share their progress on the main community (mailing) lists and other communication channels.
* We will require mentors to be very specific about what will be required for full student payment at the half way mark and the end. So no disappointment by either mentors or students.

7. What license does your project use?

GPL v2

8. URL for your ideas page

http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2008

9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

wp-hackers

10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?

#wordpress-dev on irc.freenode.net

11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to
see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)

http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC_2008_Application_Template

About Your Mentors

1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Volunteered, consistent, pleasant, and knowledgeable.

About The Program

1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Regular checking in to see how they are doing. Once someone “disappears” there is little to be done, but encourage them to come back. No students “dissappeared” last year.

2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Regular checking in to see how they are doing. If a mentor “disappears”, myself or someone else will step in. This is specifically one of the reasons that we have backup/co-mentors mentors and a mentor’s mentor this year.

3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project’s community before, during and after the program?

A big part of my job, and life is encouraging and supporting participation. WordPress itself is a tool for participation.

We regularly have a variety of activities, so people with different skills can participate.

Still, this year we’ve identified a number of ways to improve from last year including:
* Encourage applicants to blog their proposal and get feedback from wp-hackers mailing list.
* Mentors having to provide status updates as well every 2nd week (students every week). This should enrich the students experience.
* Encourage students to at least always idle in the #wordpress-dev . We heard about this great suggesting from last year’s GSoC podcast.
* Encourage mentors to have voice conversations over Skype or GTalk as a final step in the application process and during the program.
* As students reach the major milestones of their project that they share their progress on the main community (mailing) lists and other communication channels.
* We will require mentors to be very specific about what will be required for full student payment at the half way mark and the end. This will help limit disappointment of both mentors and students. This will help them and their mentors articulate their successes to the community.

4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

Ensure? After concludes? We are a dynamic, passionate community of participates. We will be there to support and encourage the students, but a student has a lot of demands on them, and outside of this program, we appreciate if our project is not a priority.

Having said that, 5 of our ten participants from last year are still involved, and we want to exceed 50% this year!

I’ll let you know if our application is accepted.

Ryan wrote in the issue ticket, “Looking back, this was a mistake. By popular demand, we’re returning to disregarding the [<!--more-->] tag when serving feeds.”

And with this change, with everything else WordPress 2.5 will give me, I now need one less plugin. I get to retire Ronald Heft Jr’s Full Text Feed.

84 students applied to work with WordPress as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code. All the applications were excellent, and it was incredible hard for our eight mentors to choose. Robert Deaton and I stretched a little bit and are mentoring two students each — I know the whole WordPress village will be helping us.

Today, I finished replying to each of the applicants that were not accepted. It was very hard. There are are so many fantastic proposals that I still hope see light — if you applied be sure to blog about your proposal! Although you will not be compensated, if you have the time, I am sure that there are many people that will help you.

Here are the 10 students and their projects that were accepted:

• Ronald Heft, Jr’s Podcasting Support (blog post), mentored by Lloyd Budd
• Mike Grouchy’s Comment Panel and Commenting System Additions (blog post), mentored by Peter Westwood
• Matthias Bauer’s Internationalization Revisited, mentored by Nikolay Bachiyski
• Keith Bowes’ Easier template tags, mentored by Andy Skelton
• Dion Hulse’s WordPress Update Plugin, mentored by Robert Deaton
• Corey Shaffer’s Helping Improve the Content Management of WordPress, mentored by Brian Layman
• Celeste Lyn Paul’s WordPress Market and Suitability Research and Prototyping (blog post), mentored by Matt Mullenweg
• Luc Bizeul’s Create Unit Test Framework for Editor Formatting, mentored by Lloyd Budd
• Bernardo Santos’s Hierarchical Page (list) Management using jQuery, mentored by Michael Adams
• Andrew Nelson’s Performance Testing, mentored by Robert Deaton

Welcome!

The summer of code starts May 28.

For those community members interested in tracking — or better yet participating in — the progress of the 10 projects over the summer, we have created a group for the students and mentors and a repository for their code.