Like you I had Typepad and Wordpress simultaneously for awhile. I thought it would be good for me to have a foot in both camps. Finally I had enough of Typepad’s wretched support. But I had a lot of material published and couldn’t move keeping permalinks intact.

I offered programmers $200 for a clean transition. Couldn’t get anyone to take me up on it. First we wrote a Typepad to Wordpress guide. People complained it was too intimidating and asked us to do it for them. Did that for awhile and finally built a Typepad to Wordpress conversion service to help people escape. I can’t believe SixApart still doesn’t have an exporter with permalinks.

I spoke with Anil Dash today at length about the export problem and he still won’t fix it, even when I offered him our custom templates to install directly as Typepad’s exporter. Not only that in the last three months, they’ve stopped us from exporting 500 posts at a time. Now it’s just 100 posts at a time. Lots of fun. Even with experience and expertise and dedication, the programming time on a single Typepad to Wordpress project is still seven to eleven hours. The first time we did it, it took 50 man hours.

Of course that’s keeping comments, permalinks and images and site structure and everything intact. But still. It’s way too hard. Anil told me about some Atom API converter but that converter just doesn’t work and is disinformation.

So Julie, if you still would like to escape that terrible Typepad beta – I feel for you – check out our guide or our service. I’ve been there and had to build a design and marketing company with my own programmers to escape SixApart’s Typepad hell.

I am really more happy to know that my decision to build my little network of blogs, stores and websites using WP and PHP seems to be the correct one. Your opinion reinforced my decision to use WP over some other platform. I am not a developer, and not a particularly great writer but I do have interests, experience and opinions about a lot of things. I was told I could make money with blogs, IF i was patient and did the right things, IF I was willing to put in the time with relevant and interesting content, IF I was willing to learn new technology, etc. So I stopped throwing my money away in the stock market and started investing in myself via blogging for dollars.

As a complete amateur almost three years ago now I started my first blog, http://www.lowcarbmarine.com with the intention of creating interesting and informative blogs (as i could afford them) about marines (i was one), health and nutrition (i lost a bunch of weight on Atkins) golf & travel (my job for the last 25 years). RVing is relatively new to me but I own a fifth-wheel travel trailer, crafts (i do mosaic so i can tell people I’m artistic), pets, (i have the best dog i rescued from the pound, etc and at the same time make some money to supplement my income as I head into my 60’s, via things like adsense, text link ads, Amazon and a few select affiliate relationships.

The theory being that one website alone is not going to make me a ton of money unless I have super-secret proprietary info to give away (I don’t) but maybe 100 sites making a few bucks a day will mount to something someday. I am trying to do this legitimately with keyword loaded, original content, video, regular updates with relevant content. Even my advertisers are relevant to my content. I knew it was going to take a lot of time and effort but nothing really worthwhile comes easy does it? To date I have approximately 14 blogs, 39 landing pages, 2 Amazon stores, a link directory and a couple of other sites. I have used WP exclusively and really find it user friendly and easy to use. Of course I did not set it up on my server and handle the plug ins – my developer did that and I was happy to pay for it. The support alone was worth the money.

Once again, I am not a developer but have worked with one I have known a long time and who I worked with when I was involved in the Hospitality Industry in Scottsdale, Arizona. I would appreciate your comments about any of my blogs as I am about to undertake a new mission. I have semi-retired to a relatively small town in Arizona (20K) and the towns businesses depend on tourism for their survival – something I know a lot about.

There was a seminar here that i attended where a guy came in from out of town and presented to area businesses “Blogging for your business made easy and affordable”. Attendance was very good with businesses from landscapers to restaurants to hotels represented. But in about twenty minutes into his presentation I realized; I know more than this guy does! I was shocked and then as he got deeper into it with his free this and free that and how easy it is, blah, blah I started thinking wait a sec – he is just overwhelming these people with BS to sell his $600. ” I will build you a blog with TypePad kit. I wanted to get up and scream, hey people there is a better way and it’s called Wordpress!

My developer and I decided a while back after I had moved and settled in that we would collaborate with a little consulting business that would assist business owners in this small town with website creation, updating, blogs, whatever. Since we both are very experienced in the tourism industry and with Wordpress as our platform we figured the best application would be to use WP as a content management system instead of the blog format. I wont bore you with the details but after hearing this Typepad guys pitch with his wild gestures and used car salesman approach I decided I had better find out more about TypePad and how to sell against it. I have registered a domain in the name of the town and plan on creating a business link directory using PHP. Your insight and defense of WP was very helpful, thank you.

Leah

“If you are catering to the type of blogger who wants to have ads on their site, then you’re catering to people less interested in providing content and more interested in earning a quick buck. That’s certainly an acceptable business strategy, but not one I would lower myself to.”

I know you’ve got some cheerleaders for sticking it to someone perceived as The Man, but as a constructive suggestion I’d really take a deep breath before you hit that submit button and take a look not only at your tone, but at the unfounded assumptions you may be making about huge swaths of people whose work you do not know. You don’t value the ability to host ads on a blog. Great. You could have simply made that point graciously. As it is, you sounded like a sanctimonious little twit.

First, if you’re making some kind of moral statement about ads… the same folks who provide the non-ad-friendly Wordpress.com are also behind the VERY ad-friendly self-hosted Wordpress. So much for the moral superiority of Automattic and their developer community. While they have specific reasons for forbidding ads on Wordpress.com-hosted blogs, they are just as happy to “cater to the type of blogger” at which you are pursing your lips like the Church Lady.

Let’s go over it in detail:

“If you are catering to the type of blogger who wants to have ads on their site…”

There is no such thing as “the” type of blogger who is ad-supported. There’s an infinite range from total spammers to authors advertising their own books to piano teachers putting up links to the sheet music they assign (how DARE they get 8% from Sheet Music Plus!) to ordinary bloggers with a few adsense units to defray hosting, to corporate blogs to put a face on a company and product, to widely read blogs that run “real” advertising from major companies eager to get in front of their highly qualified audience.

“Then you’re catering to people less interested in providing content and more interested in earning a quick buck.”

How so? Many bloggers are primarily passionate about a subject and want to earn a few bucks if they can. Other bloggers ARE primarily interested in earning a buck because they view blogging as a JOB. But who cares, as long as the content is good? When I go to work for some company, I am indeed more interested in earning a buck than I am in the company’s agenda. However, I have agreed to perform at a high level of professionalism in exchange for said buck. If I fail to meet expectations, I’ll be gone. If a blogger fails to provide content people want, same deal.

“That’s certainly an acceptable business strategy, but not one I would lower myself to.”

I assume you work for a living. So do many bloggers and other people who provide all sorts of content. If it’s “lowering yourself” to earn money providing content, then all your favorite writers, entertainers, journalists — and (gasp!) probably some of your favorite bloggers — are “lowering themselves” in a cynical attempt to put food on the table for their families.

Or do you think blogging is different, somehow above it all? Please explain.

This is not how to keep or gain customers. I don’t want a “fully loaded” fancy car if the damn thing can’t get me from point A to point B, and that’s how Typepad feels right now.

These types of comparisons, not matter how “objective” they appear to be can never cover all of the factors that matter to people — it always comes back to a question of what suits any given individual at any given time.

As for the “Typepad/MT sucks because it’s too hard to theme” type of comment, you could also argue that WP theming sucks because there is too much PHP mixed into the tags. Both can be said to be accurate, but both are clearly open to argument.

And for the record, I think both platforms are OK, and don’t have a problem with either and would (and have) recommended both to different people at different times and in different circumstances. It always come back to choosing the right tool for the job at hand.

Quote:

You neglect to point out the following link: http://celebritybabies.typepad.com/, and all the subsequently valid links that can be searched for on google. If you want to talk SEO, lets talk about the penalties of double-posted content.

To contrast on WordPress.com, lets take a look at People Magazine. The original stylewatch wordpress account link redirects to the correct URL, and even if you search at the stylewatch.wordpress.com site the links all 301 redirect to the correct server.

Example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=G&q=site:celebritybabies.typepad.com

‘You are using misleading statistics in the post you linked. The aggregate data provided by the Department of Homeland Security covers every version of each system and every third party plugin across the better part of a decade, without even taking into account reported vs. actual, fix turnaround, whether it’s third party or core, and the size of the reporting community.’

I’d like to imagine that a Department of Homeland Security would be concentrating powers upon clear and present danger and not on the comparative insecurities of blogging software — they should turn their collective attentions to how many CEOs can dance on the point of a needle if they have that much time on their hands.

All WordPress themes are, basically, PHP code. Customizing your site and it’s look requires theme editing, which invariably means editing that PHP code. While this is not difficult, it’s sometimes hard to convince people of that. From my experience as a moderator on the WordPress support forums, I can say that some people simply won’t do it under any circumstances. They have this notion that it’s beyond them, even when it is probably not.

But then again, these same people would have issues with a simple templating system as well. The problem is not that they think they can’t code, it’s that actual text scares them in some fundamental way. If it’s not about dragging things around in a GUI, then they can’t bring themselves to do it. This is where we get things like widgets to make this sort of thing simpler.

And in the long run, themes like Sandbox and similar are slowly making theme editing via PHP/Templates almost unnecessary. Sandbox can be wholly customized with mere CSS editing, is good with SEO, and highly semantically flexible. New versions of WordPress support “CSS Themes” like this, where the theme remains the same and only the CSS changes. More support for this sort of thing is planned in the future. So his point about editing PHP files might not be the case sooner rather than later.

Are you powering typepad.com with the openly available version of Movable Type? Because WordPress.com is powered by MU
1> No, they aren’t. Typepad is, and has been for some time now, a different application. The dog food argument is invalid given that the equivalent MT functionality didn’t even exist then.
2> Wordpress.com doesn’t run on the openly available WPMU, either. (See end.)

I’m sorry, but the raw number of plugins each platform has is absolutely irrelevant. It has been repeatedly pointed out that part of the reason for this difference is that both applications do things in the core code that the other does not. The MT templating language has been evolving for some time now to reduce the need for plugins to accomplish many tasks.
Now, if you want to focus on specific plugins as deficiencies, feel free.
As a sidenote, the MT plugin directory is not remotely comprehensive, and I have the personal library to prove it.

I’d like to point out that you just went on record to say that there’s no difference between the Free Download and the “Movable Type Professional Pack” advertised at $100, which… lets see…”is an add-on for Movable Type 4.1 available exclusively to paid customers”
[...]
As soon as you want to make money off of it (as you pointed out above) or “support some kind of commercial endeavor”, it’ll cost you. [from your comment on prior post]

Actually, no, you’re putting words in his mouth based upon your own lack of understanding of the licensing. The core MT application, under the MTOS license is free for any use. This is where your comparison ends, as WP has no equivalent of a commercial add-on like the ProPack, or official support(as far as I’m aware). The ProPack does switch over to a personal/commercial usage split, but that is not a requirement of the core software.
I’ve given up on trying to understand why the licensing is confusing to people; I have no problem with it, but many others clearly do so something does appear to be wrong but I have on idea what.

(Note that I’m probably even more aware[and more accurately] of the problems MT has than you are and am not denying them. But I’m also not in a position to defend WP, seeing as I don’t use it.)

(except maybe how painful it is to install MT for the first time, when it’s just piece of cake for a newbie to install WP)