On August 27th, I received an email from TypePad that the platform was shutting down, effective September 30, 2025.
Since the FOREIGNERINFORMOSA.TYPEPAD.COM blog was started in 2005 on the TypePad platform, that left me with little over a month to migrate the site to WordPress. Checking the site, it appeared that the blog posts were still there (over 1,000 of them), although the blog post counter on the administration side showed the site had 0 blog posts, so it clearly had stopped working at some point.
In addition, archive links and blog roll links were gone.
1. Exporting the blog from TypePad
By Wednesday September 10th, I tried to export the blog. However TypePad’s export tool took over 8 hours, and ultimately failed.
The next day, I searched in vain for a backup export file of the blog I had done years ago. At this point, I considered contacting TypePad support, but thought better of it: how much customer service could one expect from a company that was winding down in the next three weeks?
Fortunately, on Friday September 12th, a second export attempt which took 5 or 6 hours met with success.
2. Importing the blog and restoring navbar links
On Saturday September the 13th, the export file was imported into a temporary empty WordPress site that was set up the previous evening. The “Movable Type and TypePad Importer” plugin was used to this end. The plugin successfully imported all posts and comments – including blog post drafts that were never published on TypePad. Luckily, the archive links that were missing on the TypePad blog were autogenerated by WordPress on the WordPress site.
Disappointingly (but not surprisingly), no images from the blog were imported from the XML export file. I later learned that premium TypePad plans had options for exporting images, but at this stage of the game, it seemed too late to upgrade and get customer service for this.
The rest of Saturday and Sunday were spent re-creating the blog roll links from the Wayback Machine. It seems like they disappeared from the TypePad blog some time between the August 5th snapshot and the August 12th snapshot.
3. Restoring images
The next five or six days were spent recovering images from the original TypePad blog. Since no export tool was available, an image would be downloaded manually from the original TypePad blog. It would then be uploaded to the temporary WordPress blog media folder, and inserted into the correct blog post with new ALT text. (Of course, the obsolete image code referring to the TypePad site was deleted once the insertion was successful.)
Since the TypePad blog had 23 pages and over 500 images, this was a little laborious.
The workflow was slowed by the absence of 15 – 20 images in posts spanning the years 2009 to 2013 (with one missing from 2006). While some of these images may have been objectionable, others were innocuous, so I don’t think they were intentionally deleted by TypePad.
While all but one of these were recovered without much trouble, it was somewhat difficult to spot the small Missing Image icons while scrolling.
With this completed, all content from TypePad had been successfully recovered.
4. Redoing URLs and horizontal rules
Between September 20th and 23rd, almost all URLs from posts written between 2005 and 2009 were re-done.
This was necessary because between 2005 and 2007, TypePad post URLs were limited to fifteen characters, auto-generated with underscores between words. In other words, they weren’t very SEO-friendly.
Between 2007 and 2009, TypePad improved its system slightly, automatically adding hyphens instead of underscores to spaces in post URLs. It still limited URLs to 15 characters, which was still not optimal.
After 2009, TypePad autogenerated long URLs, so minimal work was required for these posts. There were still minor issues: if two words were separated by a hyphen or an ellipsis, they would be erroneously combined into a single word. Similarly, there was an 80-character URL limit (?) which sometimes failed to encompass the full title.
(Someone might object that changing the URLs breaks all incoming links, but that objection is moot: the original site was a subdomain of TypePad, so all incoming links will be lost on the new domain, anyway.)
At the same time multiple hyphens used as horizontal lines were replaced by HR tags. For some reason, up to 2011 I had never used the PAGE BREAK button in the TypePad Visual editor, using twenty or thirty successive hyphens to delineate page sections instead.
5. Fixing blockquotes
Blockquotes on the TypePad blog were sometimes done with DIV tags; other times with indented P tags. But between 2006 and 2011, it looks like I often added hard-returns in the Visual editor when doing these.
Perhaps this looked good on my original monitor, but on a responsive theme, some of the lines in these blockquotes had only one or two words per line.
While these hard-returns were sometimes removed manually from the posts in the WordPress site, they were more often removed by copying the text into NOTEPAD++ and using the search-and-replace function. (Searching for \r\n, and replacing with a single space.)
Tedious business, performed between September 23rd and September 26th.
6. Domain name and CSS styles
The FOREIGNERINFORMOSA.COM domain name was purchased on the 27th. Some styles on the WordPress theme were customized on the September 27th & 28th weekend.
7. Transferred temporary WordPress site to permanent host
Had a little trouble with the new web host account on September 29th, but was able to restore the WordPress installation from the temporary site to the permanent host. Set up some additional plugins, then customized HTACCESS and WP-CONFIG.PHP.
Noticed a mistake in the setup of the temporary site: two users had been created, one as an administrator and one as a subscriber. Inexplicably, the subscriber user had all the site’s posts attributed to it.
Eventually decided to do mass-edits (50 posts at a time) to convert each post’s Post Author from the subscriber to the administrator. When all 1,167 posts were thus converted, the subscriber user was then deleted.
Again, tedious, but it worked.
