Moving from Typepad to Wordpress - pains and problems

After initially starting out with ‘hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com’, for quite a while I’ve been using my own domain name ‘www.hotfromsiliconvalley.com’ for my Typepad blog, my first blog. When I decided to move from Typepad to Wordpress, I had thought that moving from the Typepad to Wordpress would be simple, easy and straight forward. Why - because Typepad allows you to export your whole blog to a text while, and Wordpress supports importing your Typepad blog. Since I owned my own domain name, I would retain my Google page-rank and all the inbound links will remain intact. Right? Oh! I was so very wrong.

If you are the text only blogger than nothing to worry about, provided you have your own custom domain name. Not me, well I use lot of audio (podcasts), photos and logos. I had approximately 300 media rich posts on my Typepad blog. Exporting the content of the blog from the Typepad in a human readable text file was the only easy part and takes less than a minute. Now I imported this text file in Wordpress by going to Manage - Import - Movable Type and TypePad, and volla, in less than 5 minutes, I had all my posts including comments and trackbacks show up in Wordpress. And that is where the easy part ends and my jaw drops. Why?

1. Typepad uses short weired urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s
2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t
3. Typepad blog name is problametic ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1’ - the second part ‘blog1’ after the slash is the name you choose when setting up your blog, and it is required that you have something here
4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com
5. All the file links and logo links are still pointing to typepad.com
6. Typepad uses /year/month/my_post_url.html format for generating URL’s while the wordpress permalink uses /year/month/day/my-post-url-that-is-seo-friendly
7. Typepad does not give me an option to export my media files
8. Typepad does not let me export my pictures (or I couldn’t find it at least)
9. Even though, I am using my custom domain name, all posts are still accessible using ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1′ url and there is no way to switch it off
10. Typepad does not allow me set up a permanent 301 redirect from old Typepad.com address to my mydomain.com

Basically Typepad is telling me not to leave and stay on Typepad.com for ever. If you do not have your own custom domain name like ‘yourdomain.com’, your blog link life will end here if you decide to migrate as all the links will become orphan, and you have to start all over again.

Well Wordpress came to the rescue. Many many thanks to Matt of Wordpress and the Wordpress community for making Wordpress so flexible. A few surgical tweaks in Wordpress, a few plugins for firefox, a few plugins for Wordpress and I was in business.

OpenSource rocks. Geeks rock. I am in love with Wordpress and FireFox. Wordpress Community and Firefox Community which helped with with the transition.

How I handled these pains, problems and issues?

To be continued in the next post…