So during my talk “Switching to WordPress Painlessly” at WordCamp, (video coming soon!) Six Apart’s Open Platforms Tech Lead David Recordon was in the audience and rather than have a chat with me at any one of the numerous times we passed during the day, he made this cute tweat instead:
There are a couple of things immediately apparent from David’s tweat:
- He has never exported a blog from TypePad
- 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tools or documentation on how to export in a way that preserves the permalinks, and because of a bug in TypePad and an unpublished permalink creation rules that have changed over the years, it guarantees a tedious, manual process to truly export the blog.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.1 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?2
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?
- Over 2 years ago when I was the QA lead of Flock, when we discovered problems in TypePads API, I requested a way to track the issues we. [↩]
- Six Apart’s own Movable Type has no solution. [↩]
The export problems get even worse for Six Apart’s other product, Vox.com. There is no backup/exporting function for user-contributed content, not even for text posts. Interestingly enough, they had an import function for posts from the very beginning.
You’re right and David’s wrong!
It’s just that plain simple…
Exporting a blog, with all the bells and whistles we incorporate into them nowadays, isn’t an “exact science” so approaching the task with humility is probably the best way to get into it.
The Net is all about traction. Export functionality is all about NOT-traction.
I’m surprised by this, as a longtime TypePad blogger who’ll be switching to WordPress soon.
I watched Ben Trott at Web 2.0 a year ago talk about its commitment to open media, data portability and the idea that you own your own data. So they haven’t followed through on that?
What it seems is that while SixApart likes to give the impression that they are so mushy & care so much about making things open etc. the fact is that all they do is make one way roads, roads leading to them but don’t want to make any leading out which is ofcourse more or like a mousetrap, you can come in but you can’t go out without bruises! It amazes me that people pay for such stuff but then people also buy Apple stuff, so not surprising!
TypePad is a nightmare to export. I did a blog last year that the exporter would die on about 1/4 of the way through. Despite constant attempts to contact their support team, we never could use the export feature and were met with only empty promises. I ended up writing a script that used the archive pages as a road map then loaded each post and grepped out all data (post, meta, comments) from that. It ended up working pretty well, but it was template dependent.
JD, unfortunately it is true. I’m reminded of the lack of solution when I engaged, in comments, Six Apart VP of Products Michael Sippey in response in his article “we’re here to compete”. That is back in March.
As Jamie describes there are some tricks that work for some blogs, but even a category based archive template with permalinks will fail (timeout, 404) for a large blog, and what do you do for the articles that aren’t in any category?
amolpatil2k, You said, “Export functionality is all about NOT-traction.”
I disagree.
There are always reasons to move from one platform to another .. and back.
Except when one direction or the other is painful. Then, instead of evaluating the new platform against the previous (with a potential for changing your choice sometime) – all you feel is relief at surviving the escape.
Failing to provide export functionality handicaps anyone wanting to ‘move’ their blog from one identity to another, as well as those wanting to try something different. The effect is to assure that most cross-platform adventures become one way; they stymie the likeliehood of anyone returning. They expose themselves to everyone commenting about trouble exporting – and warning off people considering TypePad.
One example of a similar business model – Microsoft – and how many competitors grew and flourished because of deepseated animosity to Microsoft business and standards tactics. Yes, Microsoft lives on. But each release of Windows engenders a new round of anguish. I still resent the perfectly functional printer and scanner I replaced – because there were no drivers on Windows XP. The brouhaha hasn’t completely died, yet, about the PC’s sold with Windows Vista installed – that didn’t have processor speed or memory sufficient to support the user interface.
Most of the legal snarls over Linux or even Unix lie in lawsuits from patent whores. The users and distributors are much happier with their OS.
“Export functionality is all about NOT-traction.”
Export functionality is about respect for self and for users, is about trust. And that leads to traction.
I’m not going to take the bait in the rest of your post, but what I heard you say on stage seemed to be misleading to me. TypePad does provide access to every entry’s permalink. What I think you were trying to say is that TypePad does not currently support AtomPub 1.0, but rather supports an earlier draft of the protocol from one of the interoperability testing events. We do intend to add support for the official AtomPub 1.0 standard as we’ve now done with Movable Type 4.2. All of that said, what you’re trying to do is possible on TypePad even if some “hacks” are suboptimal.
To illustrate this, you can use Tim Bray’s Atom Protocol Exerciser. If you put in the URL to the Atom Publishing Protocol endpoint and your TypePad username and password the debugging tool will return a listing of your entries (though complain that it isn’t a AtomPub 1.0 implementation). Each entry element in the returned feed contains a link element with a permalink for the corresponding post in it’s HTML format along with its title. For example:
<link xmlns=”http://purl.org/atom/ns#” rel=”alternate” href=”http://daveman692.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/some-rockband.html” title=”Some Rockband” type=”text/html”/>
I’ll never argue that any Atom Pub implementation is fully correct, but I do think this shows that you are able to use TypePad’s implementation of AtomPub to retrieve permalinks (among other data) for every post on every TypePad blog and i think all bloggers would welcome equal documentation of your proprietary WXR format (which I can’t seem to find — http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acodex.wordpress.org+wxr).
David, the simple fact is that you can’t truly backup or export a blog today using AtomPub:
* Can no longer retrieve comments on posts.
* No longer contains Pages.
* XML-RPC for trackback retrieval broke.
If you would like to argue otherwise, show me a tool that I can get a full backup of a TypePad blog. Much better, would be such a tool being part of TypePad. Really, few people care whether it’s AtomPub or something else, just end the lock in.
You seem to have an interesting definition of proprietary. Open source by it’s very nature isn’t proprietary.
There are two definitions of proprietary that people use:
The RMS-esque “closed-source”/”owned by someone”
and
The “not documented well at all”/”new when there was already a standard”
I was on Typepad for quite awhile (I joined when it was first released) and I was happy with it until I got to the point where I couldn’t easily add the functionality I wanted to my site and there was also a point there where the site was often not accessible due to server issues at Six Apart.
The export to WordPress was not painless as it did require a developer friend to do some tweaking to get it all over to the new site but I think overall it went quite well. The thing I enjoy about WordPress is the incredible community support, the ridiculous amount of plugins available and the extensive customization that you can do, something that at the time I was on TypePad I could not do.
That being said, the beauty about TypePad is that it is great for non-techical people (like me actually) but then WordPress.com covers that angle quite nicely.
All in all I definitely believe WordPress offers me more options with The Rock and Roll Report and will allow me to do more of what I want to do with the site.
Stephen, I don’t think applying that second definition to open source adds to the conversation, do you?
There is unfortunately no standard, and although there is an opportunity to document WXR, that isn’t really what this conversation has been about. The code is simply enough that I can understand it, and I know Six Apart supports importing from it in at least some of it’s products. I’ve also seem independent developers create WordPress importers, like http://haochen.me/tumblr/
If there are issues with WXR let’s weed them out, but it isn’t a similar issue to the TypePad trap.
Hey Lloyd, I’m a bit confused around your assertion that “there is unfortunately no standard”. Did you mean a standard for importing and exporting content or the definition of “proprietary”? In any case, the Atom Syndication Format and Atom Publishing Protocol are both completed IETF standards (like HTTP) and WXR is not:
– http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287
– http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023
David, Atom doesn’t describe well all of the elements of a blog, and AtomPub doesn’t describe well how to access or publish all of those elements.
Let’s continue these conversations when these basic issues with backing up and exporting from TypePad are resolved. End the lock-in!
Can you edit templates in TypePad? Can’t you just apply microformats and crawl? That’s how I got out of Blogger before they supported export (actually, they only kinda do even now…)
Stephen, “Can’t you just apply microformats and crawl”, that’s quotable. Maybe, even t-shirt worthy. That likely works for the most tech savvy among us — not me unfortunately. We considered taking just suck an approach, but it’s ultimately a lossy endeavor losing anything provide like drafts, private posts, commenter information.
It’s a pretty crazy conversation to be having though, when Six Apart presents itself as being about freedom, open standards, open technology and the open web. It seems fair to call them on it, especially when they have been given plenty of time (and customer complaints) to address this issue.
Blogger only kinda supports backing and exporting?
WXR == WordPress eXtended RSS
WXR is just RSS 2.0 extended with custom nodes defined by a namespace… or am I missing something?
Anyway, if that’s the case, here’s the documentation.
Extending RSS is completely within the bounds of the specification and so if I’m right WXR complies with the standard, so WXR could in fact be just as standards complaint as Atom/AtomPub, and RSS is much more widely implemented.
That’s why writing importers for WXR is easy, because there are a gazillion RSS parsers out there already.
And on a side note, we are working on an interoperable export format for web forums too.
I hope Six Apart will get involved with that effort for the forum component of their community software.
Hello Lloyd,
Your name came up in a conversation with Anil Dash today.
He gave me a song and dance about the Atom API and how Typepad supports it so it’s easy to move from Typepad to WordPress using Atom. From what I can see after reading this post, it was just more disinformation.
We do a lot of Typepad to WordPress conversions and would love to see a working export tool.
As it stands, we are still building custom templates. We used to be able to export 500 posts at a time but SixApart has cut us back to 100 at a time. Lots of fun on a weblog with 1200 posts. As well as the service, we wrote a full up to date guide on how to move your own site.
Our first Typepad to WordPress conversion took 50 hours to get right (images, permalinks, comments, the works). We’ve got it down to nine (programming only, not design). Until they allow an exporter with permalinks, all I can say is SixApart are bastards.
What’s positive here? We can get you out, losing nothing. What’s not so good? It costs us a lot more time than we’d like and the tedium/difficulty has to show up in the price.
Keep up the pressure on SixApart to provide a working export function. We will have a look at the Atom API and see what’s possible.
PS. I even offered to give Anil our custom export template which imports automatically into WordPress with permalinks so he could offer it on the Typepad export page. Surprise surprise, he turned down the offer.
This is a flawed business strategy by Typepad. In the mistaken belief that by making it difficult to leave, the will reduce churn. In reality for every trapped customer. 3 or 4 customers will turned off by the lack of export. Typepad sux and I for one would strongly advocate staying very far away. I have used it for 5 years and having nothing but regrets now.