This is something about me that you probably already know: In my personal and business dealings I am very loyal, and I can take some crap if I choose to. But in all things, I reach a certain threshold and I am well and truly done. There comes a straw that breaks this camel's back.
I can imagine that for some people, this rift with Typepad all seems like much ado about nothing. How can it possibly be THAT important?
Well, I've put a lot of time and effort and a lot of my heart and soul into this for the past five and a half years. I've made some of my most important relationships and done some of the most satisfying things of my life, as a direct result of this blog. As I've mentioned very recently, in fact, my blog is my favorite habit addiction hobby. It's not a little thing.
But anyway. I believe forward movement is the best medicine for almost all ills. As regards leaving Typepad, I have taken the first step. I have bought my own domain name.
Somebody already owns (the chutzpah!) NowNormaKnits.com. (but type in that address and you get nothing) WTF?
However, a simpler, easier-to-remember (so perhaps I should say thank you to whomever is squatting at NNK.com?) NormaKnits.com is (or was, until I bought it) available.
It doesn't mean much yet, because I still have to find a blog host that can transfer everything from my old blog to a new one with a minimum of cranium-bashing-against-a-masonry-surface on my part. It's not easy. Typepad has, according to this article and this one, deliberately made it nearly impossible to do so. The best we seem to have available now is to pay someone the equivalent of two years' worth of blog hosting in order to transfer it, or transfer the text only, and then manually transfer each and every image, and manually fix each and every link.
I've blogged almost every day for over five years, and I usually post at least one (and often many) photos in each post, and often include links in my posts. That comes to a bare minimum of 1,500 photos to manually move and links to fix. I'm just not willing to do that. I'm also not willing to abandon my archives. I'm not much of a sentimental person in real life (or so I claim), but the blog means a lot to me and I'm not willing to completely shut the door and walk away.
I'm not the only one who feels that way. The LinkedWithin feature that I've added to the blog matches keywords and brings up old entries that are all but forgotten. Some people have expressed annoyance at that. OK, ONE person. But I have enjoyed the nostalgia immensely, and so have other people. I recently noticed on my daughter's Facebook page that she had linked to the old post about the two kids and the hat in Central Park, saying, "This blast from the past has me in stitches tonight," and one of her old friends from grade school commented, "I forgot how funny your mom was." Well, just go ahead and warm the cockles of my old frigid heart, will ya please?!
Blogging used to be fun. But apparently hobby bloggers are no longer of interest to Typepad -- at least that's the message they are giving us. In the sage words of one fellow Typepad user yesterday, a certain knitting doctor we know and love, "the answer so far appears to be 'fuck you.'"
Yep. I agree. Or even if you don't like off-color words the way I do, you could infer a kinder, gentler, "Oh, you don't like it? Well, a large number of people asked for it. While we appreciate that you may not like it, we made this change which forever alters how you blog without giving you a choice and without letting you know we were going to do it beforehand, and if you don't like it, you can lump it." **
Same diff. "Fuck you" is just so much more concise.
So after that kind of an answer, breaking up is not all THAT hard to do.
Now I'm in the process of renting the equivalent of a blog U-Haul and movin' on up.... to the big time. It might take me a while to make the move since I'm doing all the packing myself, but NormaKnits.com, here I come.
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** I feel compelled to point out that I did apparently receive some special deference because I am a "pro" level blogger. In the response to Cookie's ticket she pretty much verbatim got the "fuck off" answer. I, however, pay more per month, so apparently I warrant the courtesy of an extra line thrown in that loosely implies that their engineers are looking into it to see if they can make the experience better.
I believe this is going to be filed under the category of "Too Little Too Late." Or "Fuck Off." You choose.
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