Why Your Business Blog Shouldn’t Be On BlogSpot.com
Link: Why Your Business Blog Shouldn’t Be On BlogSpot.com.
"No problem, we thought, Google is nice enough to provide a programming interface to support this. In fact, they have multiple such APIs (application programming interfaces). As it turns out, neither of the versions of these interfaces that Google provides works completely. One version doesn’t let you migrate comments (an important part of many blogs). The other doesn’t let you move more than a few dozen articles – period. Basically, Google has seemingly made it intentionally difficult to migrate off of their platform. This is just annoying. We ended up writing a fair amount of custom code and jumping through a few hoops to get all of the data migrated over (which we finally did). But, this was much harder than it should have been, and we’re trained professionals (so please, don’t try this at home). If you’re not a programmer, chances are you won’t be able to do this yourself. It shouldn’t be that hard."
I know that Wordpress does a good job of letting you liberate your data and move it around; I’m thinking about moving the four or five blogs that I maintain onto a single server — the fact that all of them are either in Wordpress already or are importable by Wordpress is going to be helpful.
I have been worrying/thinking about this for a while for my blog hosted at blogspot.com. I got off of their URL last year, which is half the battle, but untangling the content and the design, and getting it into a portable format, looks like hell.
Thanks for the link and promoting our blog article to your readers!
In addition to making a blog difficult to move, you also loose a lot of the SEO value for your blog if it is on Blogspot (or even a Typepad URL).
Here is a blog article I will be publishing shortly on this subject: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/3994/
Mike, just to clarify — TypePad has always supported using your own domain name with your site, and that’s what nearly all of the biggest TypePad users do.
And Jeffrey, it’s probably worth mentioning that the WP import format is only read/write with WP installs. There are other formats that, imperfect as they are, at least have interoperability between dozens of platforms.
Like which? Does Typepad support them?
Just catching up — I wasn’t trying to be coy, just didn’t want to get into boring details. The venerable mtimport format is read/write with just about every other blogging tool out there, including TypePad.