Stu Alan

Stu Alan Grumpy Expat.com
Owner and Editor

Grumpy Expat.com

A great service behind my blog! Hosting and development are very professional and the standard of ad hoc support is very comforting. Mihai's advice, for example on the palcement of widgets, is much appreciated by this novice. Pro-IT have helped me develop a blog that frequently attracts compliments regarding its appearance. Many thanks Mihai!

Home ›› MovableType Services ›› TypePad2MovableType

TypePad2MovableType

You may like to call it "typepad2movabletype", "typepad to movabletype", "type pad to movable type" or any way you like :)

TypePad to Movable Type is a service that, as movable type consultancy providers, we are happy to offer to any Type Pad blogger in need for a better publishing experience.

As you might be already aware, both TypePad and Movable Type are products based on the same technology, created by Six Apart, company based in San Francisco, USA.

The main difference between these two products is that TypePad is a fee-based hosted service, while Movable Type is actually a software that you download and run on your own web server or host (obviously, an account you create with a hosting provider for a very reasonable fee).

If you are a blogger and you are working with TypePad for some time, you already know that TypePad is quite limited when it comes to enhance your weblog with extra features or custom development.

In other words, TypePad allows you do implement certain features (quite limited) on your TypePad driven Web site, while with Movable Type apart from the fact that you have from the very beginning more features available, through the use of already created movable type plugins or movable type custom development, when talking about enhancing your online project, the sky is the limit.

As movable type guru and blogging solution provider, I would strongly recommend any TypePad user to consider migrating to Movable Type for more flexibility.

Imagine that with Movable Type anything you could think about, or anything you see appealing at your competitors could be achieved. There is nothing that could not be done in my working experience as movable type developer and I'm glad that the team mates I've trained to help me deliver more and more work here at PRO IT Service are sharing the same vision.

What does switching from TypePad to Movable Type involve?


Switching from TypePad to Movable Type involves the following operations:

1. Domain

Unless you already have one, you should consider registering a domain for your blog.

In terms of cost, registering a .com domain is less than 10 USD per year.

I've felt like mentioning also this aspect, as most of the TypePad blogs are not running based on the blogger domain, but based on the typepad.com main domain.

For instance, assuming that your blog is currently reachable at http://fashioncopious.typepad.com/

You will have to consider looking for and registering your own domain.

In this sample, the customer may consider registering a domain which to contain his site name, like for instance "fashioncopious.com" for as low as 9.69 USD with http://www.namecheap.com/.

2. Hosting Service

You should create an account with a hosting provider which supports movable type. In theory any hosting provider should support this publishing platform. However, in practice, some hosting providers do not support movable type as their low cost service doesn't provide well equipped servers.

When judging what hosting provider to use, you should have in mind in one hand to make sure that the service you are analyzing supports movable type and on the other that this hosting service is also having a movable type department offering you support anytime needed.

Having these important aspects in mind, we've partnered with Pair Networks Inc. from Pittsburg, PA, USA to offer you an excellent movable type hosting service at an affordable pricing and at excellent service standards.

As you may imagine, we wouldn't recommend our customers a non-reliable service! We've chosen Pair for a series of reasons, among which is their 28 years experience as hosting providers, the fact that they have a movable type team that users could rely on, as well as the fact that they are among the hosting providers recommended by Six Apart, the company who created movable type.

Last but not least, we're using Pair Networks Inc. services ourselves since 2001 and we've recommended it to hundreds of customers from small to mid and large organizations.

To make our hosting solution even more appealing, outside the Pair Networks standard service, we are also offering you two very important extra benefits, one consisting in weekly entire project backup (both web site files as well as mysql database), the other being 50% discounted movable type upgrades (priced regularly at 100 USD and discounted for you at as low as 50 USD).

Contracting any other movable type development or bringing us a new customer would even qualify you for cost free movable type upgrade service, whereby the take the expense on our end.

For more information about our movable type hosting service you may consult:

https://www.pro-it-service.com/movabletype-hosting.html

Hosting your movable type weblog with us will cost you 180 USD / year.

This cost may be higher in case you're project is very large and it receives a very high traffic.

3. Movable Type Installation

You shouldn't be very technical to install movable type on your server, but you should definitely be familiar with terms such as unarchiving the movable type product, creating a mysql database from inside your hosting account control panel and following the movable type installation instructions.

However, to avoid spending time on this operation, and in case you're an excellent blogger but less of a technical person, you may like to hire a movable type consultant to install movable type for you.

In case you decide hosting with us (remember that we're partnering with Pair Networks for this service, so the web server will be located in Pittsburg, USA, at Pair head quarters), we will be delighted to award you the installation service at absolutely no cost at all.

Otherwise, if you decide to host with any other provider, we're available to install movable type for you for a onetime 50 USD fee.

4. Exporting Your TypePad Content

You've written content on your TypePad Weblog and I'm pretty confident that you've also uploaded and displayed images within your blog entries.

This being the case, exporting your TypePad content means exporting all your entries as well as all your images. While exporting your entries is simple as there is an option on TypePad which does this job for you, exporting also the images is a tricky job.

As experienced service provider we have the knowledge to export the images for you.

IMPORTANT:

While switching the UK's leading commercial blog publisher, Shiny Media Company Web site, as well as the Shiny Media BranDish.TV blog project from TypePad to Movable Type I've been swamped to realize that another consultancy company provider switched some other typepad projects for Shiny Media prior to us, but without seriously addressing two items:

  1. Articles URLs;
  2. Tags;

Indeed, the option to export these parameters is not available on TypePad, but a reliable movable type consultant should always do its best to find solutions and offer a professional service.

I've coded a way to extract this information from TypePad and so I've maintained the two above mentioned Shiny Media projects individual articles URLs preventing the client from losing a lot of traffic and being penalized by Google for broken links.

Porting the tags saved quite an important amount of work that the Shiny Media Editors have made along the years.

You may like to hire me for your typepad to movable type transfer as an assurance that your project would be addressed with competence and professionalism.

5. Exporting Your Design and Widgets

The term 'exporting' is not quite proper here, as there is no option to export your design or your sidebar widgets. This service is more like grabbing your design and inventorying your widgets for being then replicated on your Movable Type implementation.

6. Importing Your Content in Movable Type

Importing your content in movable type means importing the articles you've exported from within TypePad, as well as uploading the images extracted from TypePad to your movable type installation.

7. Recreating Your Web Site

The job of recreating your weblog consist of plugging your design to movable type as it was extracted from TypePad (a little bit adapted for movable type) as well as replicating your sidebar widgets, this last operation taking a bit more time depending on the very widgets you're running on your project.

8. Pointing Your Domain to Your Weblog

Once the movable type implementation is completed and everything you've had on TypePad is restored, you have to point your domain to the server where your web site is hosted.

In technical terms this means that you should get from your hosting provider something that is called DNS (domain name server). In fact, you will get two DNS settings, as they are always available as two distinct values.

Then, you will have to login to the service you've used to register your domain (called a domain registrar; i.e. www.namecheap.com) and update your domain DNS settings with the two DNS values you've gathered from your hosting provider.

In a simpler discourse, this means that your domain registrar will update the domain so that it points to your server and thus to your blog.

When you will point your browser to say www.yourdomainhere.com you will be able to see your blog.

9. Preserve SEO and Traffic

This last aspect should be treated very seriously, as we've seen some folks limiting to just switching in between the two platforms, without considering to also bring the traffic from the typepad resource to the movable type one, as well as to use the technical means to avoid having the blogger being penalized by search engines for duplicated content.

As highly qualified and experienced providers running this service, your Web site visitors would be preserved, as well as your incoming links and search engines positioning (your ranking in Google, Yahoo, MSN and any other search engines).

It is really a very bad idea to leave this technical aspect at the mercy of a less experienced service provider as this is the key behind your project. No matter how good your content is, losing the traffic and trust you've build over a period of time both in the eyes of your readers, as well as the search engines is like committing suicide as blogger.

You will never have bad surprises using our typepad to movable type service.

Upon request, our other customers for this service could testify it for you.


These 9 (nine) operations are the key behind migrating a typepad based Web site from TypePad to Movable Type and we would like to once again state our availability to help you run this procedure safely and with absolutely perfect results.

Your movable type implementation with be an absolutely identical weblog to your TypePad resource.


As soon as these steps are completed, you're weblog will run backed on the movable type publishing platform and from there on you won't have to worry about being or not being able to build up absolutely any feature or widget that comes to your mind.

Hire us for migrating your typepad blog to movable type at any time!

Use the contact form above or the project evaluation form below.


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