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tools or documentation on how to export in a way that preserves the permalinks, and because of a bug in TypePad and an unpublished permalink creation rules that have changed over the years, it guarantees a tedious, manual process to truly export the blog.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?

Today I was helping work through some of the WordPress.com support requests, and a customer asked about this very issue.

I’ve never heard described a real problem — that it doesn’t pass W3C Markup Validator I don’t see as a problem in itself. I would love for a real problem to lend weight to the argument of YouTube addressing this, though allowing browsers to run lean, mean, and fast is itself a pretty good reason.

So I did some research. It seems that a solution is both reasonable and well known:

• Drew McLellan, Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards

Specifically about YouTube:

• In Spanish, YouTube, WordPress 2 y Xhtml
• In German, YouTube XHTML
• Bernie Zimmermann, Embedding YouTube Videos as Valid XHTML 1.0

Is there good reason YouTube hasn’t done this?

YouTube Help turns up nothing.

Aidas Bendoraitis asked this question on YouTube API Developer Forum, but his question has gone unanswered.

I don’t think I have any contacts on Google’s YouTube team, so I will put this out there for now, and wait for an opportunity to pursue this further.