If you’re a TypePad customer, be aware that the hosted blog service will be in maintenance mode this weekend. From a note on the Six Apart Status blog last night:
We have a scheduled maintenance window on Saturday evening from 11:00 PM through Sunday morning at approximately 4:00 AM to upgrade our database server. Upgrading the database server will enable us to further scale our operations and deliver stronger, more reliable performance.
Those times are equivalent to 8:00am to 1:00pm Central European Time (GMT +1) tomorrow Sunday. And here’s the most important news for customers:
Weblogs will be accessible to your readers during this time, however you will not be able to publish posts, leave comments or receive TrackBacks.
In other words, people can visit your blog but you’ll not be able to do any publishing, editing, comment/trackback approvals or otherwise interact with your blog, only visit it.
There’s more.
Further service maintenance will take place this coming Tuesday. From a post in the Everything TypePad news blog:
[…] As of 9:00 am PST on Tuesday, February 7th, We will no longer be accepting weblog traffic on IP addresses 66.151.149.10 (old IP) or 216.129.107.21 (temporary IP used during data center move)
The vast majority of our customers and readers of their blogs will not be impacted by this change.
There are a small number of customers (less than 100, based on our analysis) who are currently using the Domain Mapping feature on TypePad and have hardcoded their domain to either of these IP. As of 9:00 am on Tuesday, their weblogs will be inaccessible at their mapped domain name. Viewers of these domain mapped weblogs will be presented with information explaining this service change and steps necessary to remap their domains.
In preparation for this event, we have emailed these customers on nearly a weekly basis, informing them about this change, and encouraging them to modify their settings at their domain registrar.
With such things going on, now is a good time to back up your blog. Do it today if you can, before the maintenance starts. Here’s how:
Backup your blog
- Log in to your TypePad account.
- Click on the name of one of your blog accounts (or the only one). You should now be at this location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name].
- Above the blog name towards the top of the page, you’ll see a row of links. The one you’re looking for says “Import/Export.”Click on that.
- Location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name] > Post > Import/Export.
- Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll see a link called “Export Posts from your TypePad Weblog: [blog name].”
- In Windows, right click on that link and choose “Save link as…” (Firefox) or “Save target as…” (Internet Explorer).
- Choose a place on your compouter to save the file.
- The file downloads, and you’re done.
A couple of things to note.
I’ve just backed up this blog; the default filename the backup has is post.htm. If you get a similar name, you’ll need to do at least one thing – change the file extension to .txt as it’s not an HTML file, just plain text. Then you’ll likely want to give the file a more meaningful name.
Related Nevon posts:
Neville,
It wasn’t until I reached your 8 steps that I finally read the title correctly: back up, not pack up.
Now why would I automatically be thinking that…
Neville,
Thanks for the post. I appreciate you giving us all a “heads up” on the maintentence window. I am a VERY new blogger in the area of internal communication and collaboration and have a Typepad site in “beta mode.”
Although WordPress is easy to get started with, I am willing to pay the $4.95 per month for the extra features of Typepad. Thanks again.
Cheers!
ROFL. That’s very funny, Dan!
Brad, glad you found it helpful. It’s worth keeping an eye on the status blog and the TypePad news area precisely for when things like this come up.
Typepad Users Backup Your Blog(s)
If you’re using Typepad as your blogging platform, you may have noticed a news item from Typepad alerting you of server upgrades this week. This means it’s a darn good idea to back up your blog(s) now. Neville Hobson has
Or you could always transfer over to WP and host it with a provider who understands scale 🙂
That is some really good information on the topic of blogs backup. However, I noted that it is relevant to TypePad users. I have put up a method of my own for Blogger users. It is at
http://rankwil.blogspot.com/2006/01/backup-your-posts.html
Neville: Do you mind if I link to your post from my blog?
Regards
That’s very useful, Ranjit. Of course you can link. Just go ahead!
Dennis, it’s probably worth pointing out that the hosting provider you’re mentiong as scalable provides no export of your entries, so you can’t back them up if you want to using methods like Neville’s. As for performance, see the independent results for yourself:
http://www.grabperf.org/
You’re referring to WordPress.com, Anil, the hosted WordPress solution, right? If so, you’re right – unlike TypePad, no native export/backup feature (nor import, for that matter), ie, the user being able to perform his or her own content backup. I presume the service itself backs up the content on its servers.
Until WP.com offers that capability, or until there’s a 3rd-party plugin, there is a way – subscribe to your own RSS feed so you’ll have your text content. And if you write your posts in an offline editor, you’ll also have all your content.
If you post lots of images, you won’t get those (they’ll show in your RSS feed but linked to where they physically are online). But you can’t back up images either with TypePad.