On this day we finally celebrate the long-hoped-for disintermediation of typepad in this blog’s existence.
I moved my blog to this self-hosted wordpress instance in 2018, frustrated with some decisions taken at the prior host, typepad. But these past 6 years, I have been unable to completely end my relationship with typepad, because I had literally 1000’s of pictures and blog-internal links to the old site (I’d been with typepad for 14 years!), all wrapped up in the page code imported to the new site, and I had no easy, automated way to fix that. So I have had a habit to go in and manually update these broken links, to go and manually grab the photos from the old site and get them properly moved to the new site. I have done a few here, a few there. I have had some bursts of productivity, but I rarely would get more than a dozen blog-posts processed in this way at once.
In the last six years, I have processed about 3000 old blog posts, dating from the blog’s founding in 2004 through 2018. And finally, this afternoon, I closed in the last remaining ones. Because I was only semi-systematic in my approach, these last stale blog posts were from October, 2013. They dated from the conclusion of my radiation treatment for my cancer. Somehow that felt weirdly symbolic.
So now, if I want, I can finally stop paying typepad for their hosting of the old blog. This was never a financial burden – my newer, self-hosted version actually costs me quite a bit more. Typepad had offered a deal, when I first signed up, for a “rate never changes” hosting plan that I’d signed up for. So the rate, a mere $50 / year, has never changed. Unfortunately, the quality of their support never changed much, either – it was always consistently bad. And the last straw was when they forced technical changes, with zero support or understanding, that broke material I’d posted.
Anyway, I’ll let the typepad hosting plan die a natural death, waiting until the end of the annual renewal – I believe that’s in August or September. And I really have to hope I don’t ever become disillusioned with my current blog hosting provider, since that’s… myself.
