When I first started this blog, back in 2006, I used our (back then) Autodesk-recommended blogging platform, Typepad. When configuring the blog I had in the back of my mind that I’d end up putting it on a custom domain of some kind (perhaps Shaan Hurley’s autodesk.blogs.com), so I chose to use a blog-specific subfolder (through_the_interface) beneath the main through-the-interface.typepad.com site.
I did this for a good reason, but it did result in pretty monstrous URLs for this blog. And I didn’t end up using a custom domain, after all, so we all ended up being stuck with big old URLs… not pretty, but hey.
A couple of years ago I looked into what it would take to migrate this blog to a WordPress-based infrastructure. There are things that irritate me a great deal about Typepad – for instance, search is basically broken, as many of you will have found out at one point or another, over the years – but it turned out to be impractical to migrate. The biggest problem related to code… all the other content – even comments – came across well, but backslashes in code did not. Which was basically a deal-breaker, given the historical focus of this blog.
After giving it a great deal of consideration, I’ve decided to continue with Typepad, albeit behind the custom domain I’d earmarked for the new site. That should help with finding the blog easily, of course.
You can now access this blog via keanw.com.
You may get some quirks when you get to the site via HTTPS: at the time of writing, Typepad is apparently working through how browsers will be able to access their blogs via HTTPS… the main issue I see relates to mixed content, right now, so occasionally you’ll see this blog naked without its stylesheets loaded when attempting to access the site securely:
The Typepad team appears to be taking the issue seriously… while most blog content doesn’t need to be accessed via HTTPS, there’s an understandable trend towards browsing all web content securely. Hopefully they will have this fixed soon... there have been a few bouts of “planned” maintenance over the last few weeks – each of which resulted in my blog being offline for 4-8 hours at a time – which I had hoped would help. Please accept my apologies if you see the odd naked page: clicking on any link will hopefully make the styles work properly.
One advantage of sticking with Typepad, for now, is that it doesn’t break existing links to posts. You’ll be able to come via through-the-interface.typepad.com/through-the-interface or keanw.com links without any problem. Typepad doesn’t allow access to their .htaccess files, which means there isn’t an easy way to transition permanently across to another platform while keeping the benefits of years-worth of SEO, etc. (hmm, funny that).
Please do let me know if you have any issues accessing the blog… I’ve (again) swapped the search to use Google Site Search, as using a custom domain led to the standard Typepad search not just being crap but actually broken. Hopefully this will make things a bit better, but feel free to let me know, either way.
