Typepad Leaves Users Scrambling

As a longtime follower of In Reference to Murder, Virginia author B.V. Lawson’s very active blog, I was surprised to discover this note posted there recently regarding her use of the Typepad blogging software:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Typepad is shutting down at the end of next month (alas, they only gave us one month’s notice). I’m gradually moving this blog over to Blogger and will be posting on both sites at the same time. Please update your pointers to this new link and wish me luck as I try to import all the old blog posts which will be lost forever if I can’t figure out how to port them over. And please be patient with me as I try to recreate the blog in its new home (and fingers crossed Google doesn’t kill Blogger any time soon).

Holy crap! I can’t imagine the volume of labor necessary to shift the entire contents of In Reference to Murder (including what Lawson has said are “over 3,000 links for mystery readers and writers”) onto another Web platform. If Blogger, the content management system I also use for The Rap Sheet, were to close up shop within the space of a month, I am not certain I would have the determination—much less the technical expertise—to migrate its 9,000-plus posts elsewhere. I might just have to retire from the blogging game after almost 20 years. Fortunately, I’m not being forced to make that call.

The expiration of In Reference to Murder’s Typepad version will mean that many links from this site to hers will go dead. I shall try to fix those as I come across them. Just give me time.

Meanwhile, I checked all of The Rap Sheet’s links in the right-hand column of this page to see whether more would be affected by Typepad’s demise, and I found only two: Ben Hunt’s Material Witness blog and Harriet Devine’s Blog, neither of which has been updated since January 2024. I presume those will soon vanish, as well.