Continuing the process of merging my professional and personal blogging, today I imported all the posts from my old personal site to this site. (So if you enjoy my cocktails, no need to go back to the old site to find them.)
The process of exporting and importing posts within TypePad was ridiculously easy. It couldn't have been any simpler, so all I'll say is RTFM. But it is worth noting that I would have had a much harder time moving any images if I'd been maintaining them conventionally within TypePad.
TypePad makes it easy to insert images in your posts--just hit the "Insert Image" button on the editing toolbar and follow the instructions. The problem is that all images uploaded in that fashion are simply dumped into a directory entitled "photos" which is associated with your TypePad account but is inaccessible to you as a user. Once the images are uploaded, you can't manage them in any way--you can't even delete them. (You can remove them from a post, but they're in that directory forever.)
And even though TypePad makes it very easy to export posts and very easy to insert images, if you've used their process to insert images, they will not be included in the exported data. Stupid. I inquired with TypePad support to confirm this, and they said, yep, you'd going to have to move the photos manually (and even after all that effort, you're still going to have to edit the image URLs in the exported posts. TypePad does have a search and replace function to make this a little easier, but still--it's crazy.)
I wasn't comfortable having so little control over the images on my site, so instead of using the "Insert Image" function, I used TypePad's file management features to create a directory structure where I could upload, save and manage my images. Going to Control Panel > Files opens up the root directory for your TypePad account, which contains folders for each blog on your account. Within each blog's folder, I just created a folder entitled "images," within which I created sub-folders for the year and each new month. (Note that TypePad doesn't allow you to move folders or objects within them--you can only delete them--so you need to think through your schema before you get started.)
To add an image to a post, I just go to Control Panel > Files and the appropriate image folder, upload the image to TypePad from my hard drive, grab the newly created URL for the image, and use the "Edit HTML" tab (rather then the WYSIWYG editor) to insert it within the post.
This is admittedly more cumbersome and time-consuming than TypePad's standard image-insertion process, but I think the ability to manage, delete and export the images after they've been uploaded to TypePad is well worth the extra effort. (Note that the images that I imported from my other site still reside in that blog's image folder within my TypePad account, so I can't ever delete it, but that's no big deal.)
tags: typepad
