When I wrote about WordPress last year and mentioned possible contingency plans in re: what blog-hosting service to replace it with if need be, Typepad didn’t make the list. I’d seen the name occasionally, as have most people who’ve been on the Net a while and sometimes follow links. It’s been around for decades. But it didn’t occur to me at the time.

That’s probably for the best, as Typepad is shutting down, with a month’s notice starting last week. The complaints from people who’ve been blogging on Typepad for 15 or 20 years started almost immediately…

Fun fact: Typepad reportedly has an export feature – in what format, I don’t know – but it can’t batch-export images. And like I mentioned, some people have 20 years’ worth of posts and images on there, and a month’s worth of their free time to work it out.

Another fun fact: Typepad may already be losing functionality – at time of writing, that announcement post and the blog’s homepage were down. (Here’s a Wayback link.)

No explanation has arisen for any of this, other than aggrieved customers guessing that one or more of Typepad’s shadowy venture-capital overlords didn’t see it as profitable…