Typepad sucks

A cheesy headline, my apologies.  This will probably be a temporary post.

I pride myself on a daily update on Granny Buttons, usually at noon. 

But there was none this weekend.  The reason:  My credit card expired and I'd not got around to accepting the renewal.

Typepad (my blog service) couldn't automatically debit the monthly subscription and shut me out and wouldn't accept my preferred payment method of Maestro/Switch, nor even PayPal.  And they give only 7 days notice.

The upshot was that I had to hurriedly renew my Visa over the weekend, even though I didn't want to.

You might say 'why not use a free service like Blogger?'  There are a bunch of reasons, but mainly I'd got used to the ease of jiggling the layout, although I'm getting quite unhappy about the slowness of posting. 

But I now don't recommend Typepad, for one huge reason: If you refuse to renew, you've lost your access to old posts and files.  Which in my case was five years worth.

The big problem, though is that Typepad isn't keeping up with the competition.  It continues to roll out irrelevant features like fancy new designs, instead of proper features like RSS feeds on comments.   

Perhaps I'll finally get around to moving to Wordpress.  There's a lot of work involved, and all the old hyperlinks won't work any more.  But it'll feel a bit more reassuring.

Maybe the fripperies are what most of its customers want, I dunno.   But Granny (a beta tester on Typepad, No. 3641, in July 2003) is very dissatisfied.

When I do change, the other problem I've got is that all my old links are going to be dead.  If you've linked to a specific link in the past, my apologies. They'll soon be dead.

Hey, I just realised, Granny just passed her fifth birthday, and I forgot to hold a party!  Where were all your cards and gifts?

Comments

[Richard]

As blogging virgins we have found wordpress really easy (and free). I had seen the import option in wordpress and wondered what it did...

[Max Sinclair]

We were all worried about you. Thought the moon had gobbled you up.Plenty of water in the cut.

[Richard Fairhurst]

May be able to help you with the links - there are ways round that. Yell as and when you're thinking of doing it.