A welcome sight for every TypePad customer – you can access the TypePad service again and you can update your blog to reflect accurate content.
(Quick jump: I’ve included some tips below on how to republish your blog and how to make a backup of its post content.)
If you didn’t visit this blog at all yesterday, you won’t have noticed the lack of latest content nor that the blog was offline for much of the day as a consequence of the complete outage of TypePad service for about 18 hours. As I have a WordPress blog in addition to this one on TypePad, I was able to post during Friday, including further commentary about this matter here. (Take a look at the comments in both of those posts.)
From a quick scan around this morning on what bloggers are saying and what some mainstream media are saying about yesterday’s service outage, it’s pretty clear that Six Apart have quite a job on their hands now to rebuild some credibility as to the ongoing reliability – perhaps even its viability – of the TypePad service.
In the meantime, I’m sure one question on every TypePad customer’s mind will be – did I lose any of my stuff during this loss of service?
According to Six Apart, no. I’d agree with that view purely from what I’m seeing on this blog. Everything is there and now up to date (but see below). If you have a blog with lots of photos – a photo album, for instance, or a moblog like mine – you’ll likely encounter lots of blanks where you expect to see your photos.
Don’t panic, though – all the data is still there, according to Six Apart. While they will be working during the weekend to get everyone’s blogs up-to-date, you can do this yourself by republishing your entire blog again, as follows:
Republish your blog
1. Log in to your TypePad account.
2. Click on the names of one of your blog accounts (or the only one). You should now be at this location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name].
3. in the Weblog Editing Shortcuts column on the right, click on the link under Design that says “Edit your current design.” You should reach a page entitled “Edit current design for [blog name].”
4. Location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name] > Design.
5. Scroll down that page until you see at the bottom two buttons: “Preview” and “Republish weblog.”
6. Click the obvious one!
7. You’ll get a pop-up window with a drop-down list of choices. Make sure that list says “Publish all files” (it should as this is the default choice).
8. Click on “Publish.”
9. Wait until it’s done and then visit your blog to check. All should be up-to-date. You might need to force a refresh so that your browser reloads the blog from the server rather than from your browser’s cache. In Windows, you can do this by pressing F5 or holding down the shift key as you click on the refresh icon in your browser.
I did precisely that for this blog and for my moblog (although the moblog didn’t update all the pics – blank ones sport the legend “Image being restored this weekend”- so that will wait for Six Apart to complete their updating).
Next, do your own backup of the content of your blog. Here’s how:
Backup your blog
1. Log in to your TypePad account.
2. Click on the names of one of your blog accounts (or the only one). You should now be at this location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name].
3. 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.
4. Location: TypePad home > Your Weblogs > [Blog name] > Post > Import/Export.
5. Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll see a link called “Export Posts from your TypePad Weblog: [blog name].”
6. In Windows, right click on that link and choose “Save link as…” (Firefox) or “Save target as…” (Internet Explorer).
7. You’re done.
What you’ll have a is a plain-text file saved to your computer that contains all the text content of your blog, including all comments and trackbacks. What the file doesn’t have is any image from your blog. But you have the originals on your PC, right?
Now, back to normal blogging!
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
