Getting back up to speed with TypePad

A welcome sight for every TypePad customer - you can access the TypePad service again and you can update your blog to reflect accurate content.

(Quick jump: I've included some tips below on how to republish your blog and how to make a backup of its post content.)

If you didn't visit this blog at all yesterday, you won't have noticed the lack of latest content nor that the blog was offline for much of the day as a consequence of the complete outage of TypePad service for about 18 hours. As I have a WordPress blog in addition to this one on TypePad, I was able to post during Friday, including further commentary about this matter here. (Take a look at the comments in both of those posts.)

From a quick scan around this morning on what bloggers are saying and what some mainstream media are saying about yesterday's service outage, it's pretty clear that Six Apart have quite a job on their hands now to rebuild some credibility as to the ongoing reliability - perhaps even its viability - of the TypePad service.

More on this later.

In the meantime, I'm sure one question on every TypePad customer's mind will be - did I lose any of my stuff during this loss of service?

According to Six Apart, no. I'd agree with that view purely from what I'm seeing on this blog. Everything is there and now up to date (but see below). If you have a blog with lots of photos - a photo album, for instance, or a moblog like mine - you'll likely encounter lots of blanks where you expect to see your photos.

Don't panic, though - all the data is still there, according to Six Apart. While they will be working during the weekend to get everyone's blogs up-to-date, you can do this yourself by republishing your entire blog again, as follows:

Republish your blog

1. Log in to your TypePad account.
2. Click on the names of one of your blog accounts (or the only one). You should now be at this location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name].
3. in the Weblog Editing Shortcuts column on the right, click on the link under Design that says "Edit your current design." You should reach a page entitled "Edit current design for [blog name]."
4. Location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name] > Design.
5. Scroll down that page until you see at the bottom two buttons: "Preview" and "Republish weblog."
6. Click the obvious one!
7. You'll get a pop-up window with a drop-down list of choices. Make sure that list says "Publish all files" (it should as this is the default choice).
8. Click on "Publish."
9. Wait until it's done and then visit your blog to check. All should be up-to-date. You might need to force a refresh so that your browser reloads the blog from the server rather than from your browser's cache. In Windows, you can do this by pressing F5 or holding down the shift key as you click on the refresh icon in your browser.

I did precisely that for this blog and for my moblog (although the moblog didn't update all the pics - blank ones sport the legend "Image being restored this weekend"- so that will wait for Six Apart to complete their updating).

Next, do your own backup of the content of your blog. Here's how:

Backup your blog

1. Log in to your TypePad account.
2. Click on the names of one of your blog accounts (or the only one). You should now be at this location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name].
3. Above the blog name towards the top of the page, you'll see a row of links. The one you're looking for says "Import/Export."Click on that.
4. Location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name] > Post > Import/Export.
5. Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you'll see a link called "Export Posts from your TypePad Weblog: [blog name]."
6. In Windows, right click on that link and choose "Save link as..." (Firefox) or "Save target as..." (Internet Explorer).
7. You're done.

What you'll have a is a plain-text file saved to your computer that contains all the text content of your blog, including all comments and trackbacks. What the file doesn't have is any image from your blog. But you have the originals on your PC, right?

Now, back to normal blogging!

Technorati: Six Apart, typepad.

Comments

[Andrea Weckerle]

Thanks so much for the concise how-to on recovering from TypePad's outage. After initially fearing I'd lost a week's worth of posts, I'm now going to backup my material on daily basis.

[Dennis Howlett]

Three things 6A is not understanding:
1. There's consumer and there's business. The two are very different.
2. Enterprise class service.
3. Free+apologies may be good for consumer but business wants service.

What worries me more is the apologetic PR community. I am alarmed at the PR-laden way 6A approached it on ZDNet. Cazy. Steve Rubel's remarks were unbelievable. Comparing to eBay in 1998-99. This is 2005. It's different. The whole buzz around this is: "good enough, just works, simple, easy." No way comparable. And we've moved on, our expectations are much higher.

PRs should know by now - screw business people, you're dead. If 6A was quoted on NASDAQ, how many execs would be left? None. Social software may sound cuddly but $$ bills have no conscience, no emotion, no passion.

Square that circle if you can 6A. 90 days and counting.

[martin english]

I'm with Dennis on this one - bugger the fine details of your business model, your FAQ, whatever - it comes down to the expectations I (the user) have:
If you expect me to rely on your service, I need to your service to be reliable.

[Philip Young]

Thanks, Neville. I had no idea that I could back up Mediations like this. Now I'd better write something worth keeping...

[Dennis Howlett]

Another thing - Niall Kennedy had a great opportunity to nail Anil Dash on the podcast interview. He blew it comletely. Instead of hanging around outside 6A office to get an exclusive, Niall might have been better employed watching the likes of Phil Hollows at FeedBlitz who described the nature of the outtage. It falls into the Scalability 101 category.

Now if a journalist had been on the case...??

[Jeff Nolan]

Neville,
I tried this backup function a month ago attempting to move my typepad blog archive to wordpress, it didn't work. Even now it stalls while creating the file, maybe it's because I have 2,000+ posts.

[jeff]

Also, pictures and files are not included in the backup so you would have to separately create a new images archive (with the same filesnames) and edit the backup file to reflect a new target URL before uploading.

Somebody really needs to come up with a backup mechanism for blogs that is adopted across the range of platforms.

[Nevon]

Jeff, my experience in TypePad export/WordPress import has been wholly successful so far. When I did a TypePad > WordPress experiment last month, I followed the instructions from the WordPress Codex:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_Movable_Type_to_WordPress

Worked perfectly.

The big issue, though, is ensuring hyperlinks are maintained and I haven't resolved that yet (which is the prime reason why I've not yet completed the migration).

Re pictures and files, you're right - you don't get those in an export of content from your TypePad blog.

Andrea and Philip, glad the tips were helpful.

Dennis, I haven't yet listened to that Niall Kennedy podcast you mention. Queued up in my iPod ;)