A Farewell to Typepad
In November of 2005, I started the Tablas Creek blog with a brief post welcoming people and promising to "share thoughts on what's going on at the winery and around the country, as well as share thoughts and insights on the state of Paso Robles, Rhone varietals, California, and the wine business in general." I didn't yet know what I was going to write about, really. It would take me a couple of years to feel like I'd found my voice. But though I didn't know it at the time, I had started what would become one of the most fulfilling parts of my work at Tablas Creek.
The first choice I needed to make was a platform, and based mostly on the Perrins having used it for their blog, I chose Typepad. This was an era where blogging was exploding, and there were a slew of different options, from Blogger to LiveJournal to Xenga to WordPress. Typepad appealed to me because it had an intuitive design interface that was like typing into a word processor, robust support and integration with other tools, and a broad community of other bloggers to learn from and share ideas with. I uploaded a cover image, set up a few lists, and I was off.
Over recent years, it became clear that Typepad had fallen on hard times. Images, particularly on older posts, would struggle to load. Questions I submitted would take days to get a response. And it had been years since they offered new templates or integrations. So it wasn't a total shock when I got the news last month that they were shutting down the service. Still, the time frame was short to get what amounted to over 1000 posts, 5000 images, and 2500 comments out and into some portable form that could be transferred over to one of the many newer, more modern publishing platforms that have proliferated in recent years. One of the first things we did was set up a custom domain (so instead of tablascreek.typepad.com we moved the site to blog.tablascreek.com) to give Google a head start on getting their search database updated. That's still a work in progress, but seems to be getting there.
Meanwhile, please welcome the new Tablas Creek blog, now hosted on Ghost. It's been a bit of a journey to get here. Ghost is new enough that it hadn’t ever built a tool to import natively from Typepad, and didn’t have enough time to do so in September. WordPress had built a tool to import Typepad blogs, and Ghost has a WordPress import tool, so we took the content out of Typepad into WordPress, and then back out of WordPress into Ghost. I’m happy with where we landed. Things may still look pretty bare-bones, but all the stories, categories, and images are here. It has a snazzy search interface if you want to use it. It has built-in email capabilities, and we'll be working to get anyone who subscribed to our Typepad blog's updates via Feedblitz set up on this new interface.
Because Ghost does comments differently – you have to create an account to post a comment – we're still figuring out if and how we can share the many (often brilliant) comments I received over the last 20 years. At least they're downloaded. But we'll be back to publishing regular updates, and we will be building out additional functionality in the coming weeks. If you have suggestions for what you'd like to make sure we preserve (or what you'd like us to try that we haven't) I hope you will share. There will surely be glitches; I hope you will both be patient with them and will let me know where they are so we can get them fixed. But you can rest assured that the Tablas Creek blog isn't going away. It's still my best avenue for sharing the inner workings of our grapegrowing, winemaking, business, and team. It has been the starting point for some of my most durable relationships with our customers, writers, members of the trade, and other winemakers. It's still how I work through the things that are keeping me up at night, and the first way I think to share the things that get me jumping out of bed in the morning.
Meanwhile, thank you to the team at Typepad for 20 pretty great years. And thank you, blog readers, for making this outlet a truly distinctive part of the Tablas Creek community.
If you're new here, and want to check out some favorite posts, check out this one, from December of 2022, where I celebrate reaching 1,000 posts by picking a dozen that meant something special.