Hello WordPress, goodbye TypePad

We’re now on the WordPress platform – at least temporarily. I wanted to get onto CivicSpace but the leap is a bit too far for the moment. I’ve gone into the reasons for moving to this platform elsewhere. Here I’d like to share what I’ve learned:

• TypePad is definitely a good ‘playpen’ service that you can try out as a way of putting your toe into the blogging waters, preferably behind the corporate firewall or by making the blog private to the organisation through a password system.
• I’m less certain about Movable Type, the platform on which TypePad sits. It is a different product and coaxing it into doing the things you’ll want to is far from straightforward. It does however represent a reasonable half way house, especially if there are only a handful of corporate blogs and the business is not too concerned about coordination.
• But TypePad is definitely NOT a tool for business use – at least not yet. Its authors, Six Apart have not yet figured out how to scale up their business. to provide an enterprise class resiliant service.
• I should take my own advice. I had counselled certain practices on this very issue. I’ve been saying that for years though. I paid the price last Friday.
• When you make the switch from a free or low-cost hosted service like TypePad or Blogger into the ‘roll-your-own’ world, you take a step up the learning curve. The better Open Source products are super rich in features but you need help to get them installed and working. They do not generally have the whizzy look and feel of commercial or free hosted offerings but they can be made to work just as well.The support from the Open Source community is great and is usually pretty quick. But it cannot match the ’service’ of commercial vendors. That’s the irony of using OS software compared to an all-in service like TypePad. Finding an appropriate business partner is not too difficult. There are plenty of geeks out there only too willing to help.
• Flipping from one service to another is not as difficult as moving from one accounting package to another – not by an order of magnitude. There’s a ways to go in the development community before vendors bake out the business models to support the embarassment of riches we call the OS world. So while there are some risks in going OS – even for something like this – they pale into insignificance compared to say implementing an accounting package.