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.

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.

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?

Let’s continue these conversations when these basic issues with backing up and exporting from TypePad are resolved. End the lock-in!