Just a quick note to let everyone know that a new version of WordPress was released (WP 2.3.3) to address some urgent security related issues and it is highly recommend that you upgrade to it as soon as you can. So far I’ve upgraded one of my sites and the upgrade went very smoothly. When I have more time, I’ll report back on how the upgrades have gone on the remainder of my sites - including this one - like many people with large WP sites, I’m always scared when performing an upgrade b/c there have been times in the past where they’ve caused issues that resulted in my site being down for 1+ days while I researched in the support forums how to get my site back up and running — this is one of my main complaints about WordPress even though I love it in almost all other ways. This is also why for those who are not technically inclined, I really recommend using a hosted blog service like TypePad or WordPress.com (if you want to use javascript or adsense ads, you’ll have to go for TypePad, which costs money as opposed to the free WordPress.com)

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…

In my continuing rant on TypePad’s horrifically poor system for managing comment and trackback spam, I wanted to post the following complaint:

Why is it that we are unable to ban trackbacks based on a specific IP address the same way we can with comments? Why is it that when viewing trackbacks through the TypePad Control Panel, we cannot even see the IP address of the offending spammer? I know TypePad has this information because every time it sends me an email letting me know about a new trackback that has been submitted, it includes the IP address that the TrackBack was sent from.

So what gives? Here I am manually deleting tons of spam from the same bunch of jerks, all because TypePad hasn’t implemented a simple ban trackbacks based on IP option?

(And all of you spammers - don’t bother. All you’re doing is aggravating the crap out of me, but your comment and trackback spam will never see the light of day on my blog. Everything is moderated - do you see any spam on here? No. SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!)

Wanna check your TypePad stats to see how many visitors you’ve gotten and where they came from? Too bad. Stats are temporarily disabled