I have been having some seriously frustrating conversations with the tech support people over at Six Apart. I’m hoping that they will eventually do right by me, but as it stands right now I’m ready to pull my hair out.

TypePad currently does not support 301 permanent redirects, or any modifications at all to the .htaccess file.

This prevents visitors who have bookmarked your site from knowing that it has been moved to a new location, unless you manually update each and every post to provide the link for the current URL (which is what I have been doing).

The bigger problem, however, stems from the fact that the search engines have no idea where you went. Without a 301 permanent redirect, they do not know that they should no longer index the old URL, and that the previous content can now be found at your new URL. The same holds true for technorati being able to recognize that your new blog is actually your old blog — just with a new domain name.

TypePad’s customer support says that they don’t allow customers to modify the .htaccess file for security reasons because it contains account information. Now that’s reasonable, but what if I were to just provide them with a text file that contains all of the redirect codes (which they could clearly see was not a security threat) and then the customer support themselves could just add that code to the existing .htaccess file? It would take them two seconds to do the copy and paste. Obviously, there isn’t any technological reason why they could not do this. It’s a matter of will they choose to help me or not.

And remember, it’s not like TypePad is a free service — I paid $149 for my TypePad Pro membership, and had been planning on renewing it indefinitely as I have other blogs on TypePad that I had not been planning on moving (like my blog of Best Funny Pictures, which averages 3000+ visitors a day). But if they’re going to continue to hold my old URL hostage and refuse to allow me to set up 301 permanent redirects to this blog, I’m not going to be a happy customer — and probably won’t continue to be a customer at all as a result.

I’m still waiting to hear back from this customer support (we’ve been arguing back and forth about the 301 permanent redirects for quite a bit) and will obviously report the ultimate results here. Wish me luck.

Update: the official final response from TypePad customer support has come back

At this time, we do not provide the service you requested to our users.

Buggers!
Now do you see even more why it’s important to get your own domain name before you start blogging?

I also wish I hadn’t been intimidated by WordPress and had used that from the beginning… Oh well, at least I’m using it now!

So, you want to start a new blog. Maybe you don’t have much experience with blogging, so you don’t think it’s that big of a deal which platform you choose or whether you have your own domain name. Well think again.

Don’t fall trap to the disaster that I landed myself in, where I started casually blogging and ended up regularly blogging and hating the platform I was using but can’t easily switch because I stupidly put my blog on a subdomain of typepad (http://blogging.typepad.com)

Now I’m at TypePad’s mercy. They own my ass because they own my address - even though I’m paying $150+ a year for their service. The same could happen to you whether it’s a subdomain on typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com.

By not having your own domain name, if you ever decide to move to another blogging platform you run the risk of losing all (or a lot) of your traffic, your search engine rankings, all of your hard earned incoming links, etc because you cannot take your URL with you.

How are you going to redirect your traffic to your new blog when you have NO ability to, say, set up a 301 Permanent Redirect? Which, for those who are wondering, would both:

• automatically redirects human visitors to your new blog site
• tells the search engines that your blog has permanently moved and gives it the new location

(BTW - has any TypePad user whose blog address was a subdomain had a high traffic blog with a lot of backlinks into it that they then moved to a WordPress blog hosted on their own server? Please tell me what your experience was, whether you lost pagerank, traffic, search engine rankings, etc!!!)

Domain names are cheap - about $9 a year for a single one, as low as $6.75 a year if you own more than 50. There is NO excuse to not have your own domain name for your blog. You will regret if at some point down the road if you don’t start out with your own domain name.

www.GoDaddy.com is the site that I use to register my domain names, although there are numerous other options such as $5.99 Domain Names at 1&1, and, if you only need a single domain name the cheapiest option is domain names from Yahoo! for only $2.99.

The irony here is that I actually own a lot of domain names and I genuinely can’t fathom why I didn’t just use a domain of my own when I started this blog. Don’t make the same mistake as me or you could end up feeling trapped like I do right now. Consider yourselves warned.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my point is that you need to own your own domain name so the URL for your blog points to a domain you own and control. It’s okay to use a subdomain off a domain that you own, but not one that belongs to someone else such as that of a hosted service like typepad.com.

And it’s okay to use a hosted solution - just make sure you pick one (like typepad.com or blogger.com) that allows you to use your own domain name (and always reference your blog’s URL w/your own domain) so that if you ever decide you want to go elsewhere, at least you’ll be able to take your traffic with you. And it’s also a good idea to check to see if whatever blogging platform you start with has the ability to export your posts (and comments/trackbacks) for easiest porting of your site to another platform…

I just found the coolest resource! It’s called Rent A Coder, and you can post any project that you need help with, whether it be as simple as installing WordPress / MovableType / etc for you on your server, or as complex as asking someone to write a custom blogging platform for you. Want a custom template for TypePad or a special WordPress theme and don’t have the time or skills to do it yourself? Just Rent A Coder to do it for you. You can even find people to help you with Search Engine Optimization, people to write content for you, etc.

Once you post the specifics of the project you need help with, coders will then bid on your ‘job’ and you can decide who you want to hire based on their bid, the feedback they received from other users on other projects they’ve completed, etc.

From their website:

Need a coder to help you create the next ‘killer app’ or answer questions? Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

You can review each bidder’s resume and reputation online, and when you’re ready to make your decision, you can rent your personal, expert, coder with just a few clicks! Its that simple!

Posting a bid request is free, and you are under no obligation to accept any bids sent to you unless you choose to. Once you accept a bid, you will place your payment into escrow. The money is not released to the coder, till they complete the work according to your original specification. There are no service charges or finders fees for buyers.

On the flip side, got skills? Flaunt ‘em and earn cash!

Looking to earn extra income using your hard-won technical skills? Rent a Coder lets you locate and bid on coding projects and questions from around the world! By completing a free registration, you can publicize your skills on the online resume system and receive emails as new bid requests come in.

So those of you who are creating all those great free themes and plug-ins (which I hope you’ll continue to offer for the sake of the blogging community), you may wanna consider listing your talents at Rent A Coder and earning some extra $$ through freelancing.

I just did.

Link: News - HaloScan.com.

Trackback and commenting go hand in hand, especially in the weblog community, but unfortunately, there hasn’t been an easy way for Blogger, Blogspot, Diaryland, Diary-X, iBlog, Newspro, Pitas, and many other weblog users to implement trackback capabilities until now.

HaloScan fills this need by providing you not only with the (free) commenting services we have provided for the last one and half years, but also easy, seamless integration of trackback services (both incoming and outgoing ping support) to all existing and future Haloscan members. All this at the unbeatable price of $0.00–FREE. Getting started requires minimal work–sign up, log in and follow the simple, two-step directions to install trackback and/or commenting into your weblog. We highly recommend that all existing and new users install both the commenting and trackback services but you can also install just one or the other as needed. If you have trouble with any part of this process, we’ll be glad to help! Also, be sure to send a trackback ping to this post if you install the trackback system or write about us in your weblog.

Hmmm — so many things on my plate, but I can’t wait to try out Blogger combined with HaloScan’s free remote commenting and trackback system. Could this make Blogger a true competitor to TypePad (or perhaps even superior - given that its FREE)?

I’ll post my findings soon!

Update: It’s not as simple as it seems. According to their tutorial on sending a trackback ping, each time you want to send a trackback from Blogger (or similar tool), you have to

1. login to HaloScan
2. click ‘Manage Trackback’
3. click ‘Send a trackback ping’
4. Paste the TrackBack ping URL into the edit box for ‘URLs to Ping’
5. Fill in your blog name
6. Paste YOUR permalink URL
7. Paste a copy of your Post Title
8. Paste (or write) an excerpt from your post
9. Click the ‘Ping Now’ button.

Yikes - that’s more work/typing/copying & pasting than I want to bother with.

There’s a thread in their forums about adding some code to your Blogger templates which enables auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs (something that tools like MovableType and TypePad already do), which, if it works, could save some time - but as you’ll see in the thread people have found it difficult to implement. Your mileage may vary.

Mark Somerville wrote a REALLY cool Wordpress plug-in that allows you to include PHP code in your wordpress posts, which really expands the potential of what you can do with Wordpress. I highly recommend checking it out!