Welcome to the new home of The Last Ditch

Published by Tom

August 28, 2025

Welcome to the new home of The Last Ditch

The Last Ditch has been hosted on Typepad.com since forever but the company just suddenly announced it’s closing down on September 30th.

I’ve moved my domain thelastditch.org to WordPress. Until Typepad closes you can access all the old content at https://lastditch.typepad.com/lastditch/

I will be attempting to migrate all the old content to the new site, but please bear with me while I try to master the new system.

WordPress is much more powerful (not that I need much power for the simple things I want to do). Typepad’s content management system was second nature to me after decades of use. It’s going to be a long time before I get used to new ways of doing old stuff!

Finally, if you’ve been corresponding with me at tom@thelastditch.org, please note that email account is now dead. The email link in the sidebar here will reach me though.

Best, Tom.

9 responses to “Welcome to the new home of The Last Ditch”

jameshigham

August 28, 2025

Congratulations, Tom and best wishes for a very popular blog. (James)

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Lord T

August 31, 2025

Tom,

As long as you can make a backup of the site from the control panel you can migrate it at your leisure although not all closed source systems will allow this as they use that to keep you trapped in their system. If you can though then do it to keep your archives going. There will be apps that will allow it to be migrated to WP. Although I don’t like WP, managed by woke script kiddies who make things awkward to use.

As you still have the domain you could point to emails to a ISP and keep your email addresses. What happened to the existing one as I didn’t know that email was part of typepad. It must have pointed somewhere. Or did you simply decide to make a break?

Good luck with the new site.

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1. tom.paine
  
  September 2, 2025
  
  This morning I encountered the first proof of your opinion of WP’s script kiddies. I was tinkering with the one archived post I’ve migrated so far – “To what, precisely, are we woke?” – to understand the options for formatting. I tried to generate an AI image to prettify the “recent posts” widget, and it snootily declined to do so unless I reworded the post as it breached their guidelines. I thought maybe the title was triggering it, so I asked their AI to choose a new title. It refused unless I rewrote the post. I thought I’d acquired a new tool for my subscription fee. It appears I have, but in a different sense. In effect, I’ve hired a new nanny!
  
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  1. Lord T
    
    September 2, 2025
    
    I can assure you it will only get worse. The problem with that is that even if the post doesn’t actually violate guidelines in any way as you are on the WP site you cannot change the code or bypass any restrictions. You are trapped.
    
    It would have been better to set up your own managed WP site on GoDaddy and then you would be able to add any of the apps you want as it is you are extremely limited with options. Alternatively host it yourself and even if GoDaddy gets a bit uppity and two tier gets your ISP to start monitoring traffic and cancel sites like yours you won’t lose it as you can move it around, even on to the Dark Web if you wish. Although that requires a bit more work for you. Probably more than you want.
    
    Now is the time to move before you have too much invested. Myself, I stopped upgrading WP on my blog a long time ago. After it refused to allow me to format a post the way I wanted I restored the latest backup and disabled the upgrade. Sure I’m missing out on the latest whatever but I can format as I want I’m happy with the layout and all I want to do is put some words in a post, format them, add some pics or video and post it then manage the comments. Not hit any issues at all after all these years. I refuse to reward them for screwing up what was the best blogging platform and I would change but it is fine as it is and moving a site that has been in place for this long is a hassle.
    
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2. tom.paine
  
  September 2, 2025
  
  As to the email question, the domain was hosted by GoDaddy, but I decided to keep things simple and host it at WP. So it was I who broke the email links and I couldn’t be bothered to fix them to be honest. I have too many email accounts already and it complicates my life unnecessarily. The one in the sidebar is actually an alias on my personal account with Apple (hence the mac.com address) and so that keeps things really simple.
  
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  1. Lord T
    
    September 2, 2025
    
    I thought it was that but also thought you didn’t realise you could, and still can, leave your site where it is and have your email elsewhere but I understand about the emails. I have a similar problem myself with all the domains I manage.
    
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tom.paine

August 31, 2025

Typepad support has promised me an export file that includes images for each of my blogs. They’re under a lot of pressure so it may take a few days. If I have that for The Last Ditch then I can migrate stuff at my leisure and the pressure is off.

The default however is that your export or backup file is text only, with links to the images stored on the Typepad servers. To migrate with that file, I’d have to go through every post ever, download any images and upload them to the new site – before the Tyepad servers close down on September 30th! With 19 years of content, that would take every waking moment and even then might not be do-able. So fingers crossed they deliver the goods.

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1. Lord T
  
  September 2, 2025
  
  The images are stored on the file server. They can be downloaded easily enough in bulk with a couple of commands. However, I don’t know if Typepad allows server access. Do you have FTP access to the servers? It will take a few minutes to download the DB in SQL form which is all the text and the links and a bit longer depending on the file sizes for the images.
  
  Remember that the links are to Typepads server structure so each image will likely require an adjustment before you have a working copy you can display on your new site.
  
  If they are doing that for you and producing an archive of text and images then hopefully there doesn’t appear to be an issue. How will that be formatted though?
  
  But just in case it may be worth looking for a WP add on that can migrate a Typepad blog. You may be luck and there may be one available.
  
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  1. tom.paine
    
    September 2, 2025
    
    How is it formatted? Not at all as I turns out. The gave me a 20gb zip file of media which expands into a massive directory of images and stuff. It has weird long names for each file, which you can search by cutting and pasting from the links left in the imported text files (which WordPress will import in a single operation and format as posts with links etc.) Then I get the joyful task of uploading each media file from my computer to the correct position in each post. I can’t believe that can be done in a lifetime to be honest. There are plugins but I have to upgrade to a business account to use them and the one that deals with images is noted as not having been tested on the last three upgrades of WP so frankly sounds a bit dodgy. All I can do is get the text and structure of the posts into WP and see where I go from there. At least I have the images myself now, or I’d be rushing to fix all the image links before Typepad dies at the end of this month! What larks, eh Pip?
    
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