TypePad

» see typepad.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

typepad was the kind of thing a media organization used. that was not my crowd. i was on donanimhaber's forum making hardware signatures for my msi mobo and my pentium 4 northwood, and the people running blogs on a paid hosted platform were us business writers and uk newspaper columnists. typepad's brand was that you paid five dollars a month and got a real domain and a real cms without having to set up movable type on a server. the audience for that was professional and english-publishing first.

the service launched in october 2003 out of six apart, which was already the company behind movable type, the more technical blog engine that powered a lot of self-hosted blogs of the era. typepad was the hosted simplified version of the same idea: take the templates and the apis and ship them on a saas tier for users who did not want to ssh into anything. it caught on hard in the mid-2000s. major news brands ran corporate blogs on it (time, wired, abc, bbc, sky news), and an early wave of named bloggers like anil dash and the boingboing editors lived there too. for a few years around 2004 and 2005, typepad and movable type were how serious media did blogging.

then wordpress.com happened. typepad's paid tier got squeezed against wordpress's free hosted version, and movable type lost ground to wordpress's open-source self-hosted release. by 2008 six apart was getting absorbed into bigger orgs. the typepad brand changed hands a few times and ended up under endurance international group. development slowed to nothing. by late 2020 typepad stopped accepting new signups, and the dashboard looked like 2009 with buggy rss feeds. it coasted on existing accounts for five more years.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

in the 2004 to 2007 window typepad was the corporate blog tier. if you read time magazine's web pages and clicked into a journalist's running commentary, you were almost certainly on typepad. it had designer templates and decent comments management before wordpress.com had any of that on the hosted side. mena trott and ben trott (the six apart co-founders) had built a thing that worked, and the company was the first generation of saas-blogging brands.

~ the postmortem ~

on august 27 2025 the owners posted a notice. typepad would shut down on september 30 2025 with accounts and blogs both deleted. the platform was offering the movable type import format for an export window of about five weeks. for many of the early bloggers who never moved their archives, that five-week window was the difference between a personal record staying online and an entire 2004-2010 era of their writing going to the wayback machine only.

~ what carried over ~

the movable type lineage is real. the api shapes typepad and movable type used (the metaweblog api and the atom publishing protocol) influenced what every later blog engine had to handle. that part is inside wordpress now. the brand "typepad" lives on as an asterisk: the place a lot of new york media types kept a blog before substack existed.

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