End of the end of an era

I received an email last week from Typepad, announcing that they are shutting down their whole platform, effective the end of September. Back up yer assets before they are lost to the seas of time, etc.

I have been a Typepad user since it first began. In 2006, I had outgrown our primitive Blogger- based blog and needed to port it over somewhere. At the time, it was either Typepad or WordPress. The reason I went for the former was largely confidence (or lack thereof). I had, at the time, my domain name/s already purchased and Typepad had a relatively easy way of making the DNS work. WordPress involved an arcane process of intalling the platform on own server, or something like that. It was waaaaaay more complicated that I could do at the time. Repointing the DNS somewhere was already stretching my inelastic technical skills to the breaking point.

Typepad wasn’t ever great. The main selling point was a certain level of ‘ok-ness’. The ‘pro’ package let me do basically everything I needed to do, and - to give credit to the Typepad team - they certainly tried to add new features when they could. The social integration was never great, and I don’t think they even attempted to compete with the newsletter boom, so… the writing was always on the wall. For the $12.50/month I paid for the ‘Pro Unlimited’ plan, there always were far better ways to host and craft my contest if I could’ve ever been bothered to port it all over. But, like most subscription services, inertia proved an exceptional loyalty program.

RIP Typepad. You did the job! For two decades! That’s a millennium in internet years.

As Engadget cruelly eulogises, ‘there are probably only a few people [still] using it’, so this is a very small molehill for me to be mountaining.

But a-mountaining I will go:

There are very few blogs any more, and I think that is a Bad Thing. Blogs weren’t ‘all that’, and most of them were, of course, crap. But they were the feeder tools that taught people how to write original, well-written, medium-length articles (often on a deadline). Without the motivation or the opportunity, that capability has now disappeared. They tought us how to compose (and deconstruct) simple arguments, how to write for audience, and - conversely - to think about the composure and writing of other people.

Beyond blogs, even the corporate or commercial media that I used to read (emphasis on that particular verb) on the lunch break have now pivoted to AI-generated copy, vapid think pieces with Trumpian cadence, and noisy video extracts. There are still some very good places for longer reads (largely newsletters, paywalled sites, or paywalled newsletters), but the era of free, text-based platform sites that published original, well-written, medium-length articles, multiple times every day … well, that era is truly over.

For all the crap that the content marketing era produced, it was still fundamentally about leading people to places; away from the search screen. Now, with Google slurping everything into an AI output, there’s very little incentive to make your own digital place and put it out there in the hopes of having it found by an audience. I suspect Typepad fell into a terrible purgatory: the content is maybe good enough to get slurped up, but not prominent enough to earn a link back. Why pay $12.50/month for the privilege of publishing text that will never be read, and, at best, be stolen and barfed back to the unsuspecting?

Many (most) of you know more about this than I do, so all thoughts welcome.

I actually still have four (4!) blogs live on Typepad.

Apologies for the inside baseball, but because people are never transparent about this sort of thing, I’m going to indulge myself.

The Best of British Fantasy was, to be totally transparent, one of those content marketing schemes. It meant to support the ongoing (in theory) Best of British Fantasy series that I was editing for NewCon. The URL happened to be available, and it really wasn’t hard to churn out or repurpose listicles or essays to bump the SEO. In practice, the ‘ongoing’ series turned out to be two volumes, and I couldn’t be bothered to maintain this after the second on published in 2019. Typepad says this site somehow earned over 30,000 total visits during its short run (all organic!), which is actually pretty impressive as a proof of concept. That is, for a concept that is no longer viable, for a product that no longer exists. Good times!

Jurassic London was the site for our publishing imprint. The imprint itself closed in 2016. A few years ago, I hid most of the book pages (frustrating a few bibliophiles in the process) and just used it as a one page personal site. After being caught in the wake of some GamerGate shenanigans, I took that down too. Thus its current, very terse, existence. Jurassic somehow accumulated over 60,000 lifetime visits. The VAST majority of these visits took place during the publisher’s active years, but it still has wee peaks when folks are searching for me for some reason or another. Why did 23 people wind up there last Sunday?! Who knows?!

Of all four sites, this is the one going to make the most work for me. Although I’ve unpublished the pages, the Jurassic site is still the best (only) repository of all information about the forty-odd books we published, including publishing details, reviews, awards, etc. That all needs to go somewhere. SF/F is the most bibliographically-obsessed subgenre of fiction, and I don’t want these books to disappear from the historical record.

I also need to make a personal website. I’ve said it before, but everyone should have a basic-ass website with basic-ass contact details on it. Especially in the creative industries. Don’t just rely on a social media presence (especially since that platform is 50% likely to turn Nazi at any even point). Anyway, I’ll need one myself now. Bleh.

The Carnivore Project was the first blog, and the one that came over from Blogger (qv). I wrote about this last year, but it was an old-school blog about meat. I miss this one a lot, and have wrestled with the temptation to bring it back as a physical product of some sort. Fortunately, that itch is scratched by the derth of quality magazines about food culture - even meat culture - that already exist. Magazines like Lucky Peach (RIP), Vittles and Pit are amazing, and they are already producing exactly the sort of stuff I’d like to read (and would aspire to produce). I can sit this one out. Carnivore’s been defunct since 2009, but in the three years it was on Typepad, we picked up 110,000 visits. We had a few regulars, but mostly our traffic came in fits and starts, when bigger fish linked to one of our reviews. The future of The Carnivore Project is to be archived and forgotten in a drive somewhere.

Pornokitsch is the big fish here. 2,500 posts; 2m+ visits.

It still gets a shocking number of daily visitors. These come for two reasons:

First, because the reviews of Wizard’s First Rule or Wise Man’s Fear specifically will be shared on reddit or baidu or something, and we’ll get a thousand visitors overnight ‘cause the internet loves mean. These two reviews are the gifts that keep on giving, and I’d feel moderately bad about that I had any shame, but they still make me laugh and the works in question aren’t exactly suffering.

Second, Pornokitsch reviewed a whole lot of books, movies and games. Many - if not most - were pretty obscure. The majority of PK’s traffic always came from these ‘long tail’ searches (including being a delightfully frequent reference on Wikipedia).

With those two streams of visitors, Pornokitsch maintained a busy afterlife, despite being ‘defunct’ since 2018.

Here’s the irony part:

I’ve been making the site less usable for years. We felt it was important to keep the articles live, especially that long-tail content. We wanted to continue supporting the discussion around the stuff that was under-discussed. BUT… there was also a risk/reward balance that came from having millions of words of random rambling sitting out there, unrevised and unattended. As we all moved on with our lives and careers, we didn’t want some long-forgotten Snark of Damocles hanging over our heads. Adapting the site so it was ‘search-not-browse’ felt like a good middle ground, and that’s how it had been sitting for several years.

Recently, the site had undergone another change. Anne and I had been fretting about AI scrapers. We were particularly worried about unscrupulous entities training LLMs on the original fiction and non-fiction by guest authors, such as Becky Chambers, Molly Tanzer, Mazin Saleem, Stark Holborn, Adam Roberts and many, many others.

We had published Pornokitsch during a more innocent time, when the worst that could happen to someone’s IP was boring ol’ piracy. But, after some soul-seaching, we realised we were no longer in a position to be effective stewards of Pornokitsch’s content. We lacked the technological know-how (or resource) to protect the work that had been trusted to us. In May, we contacted the authors so they had a chance to download everything they wanted. At the end of July, we exported all the content and then removed virtually all of it from public view.

(Why ‘virtually’? Because I am a terrible person, I left up three pages: our ‘exit interview’ and the aforementioned two reviews. )

Anyway, Pornokitsch was backed up as part of the British Library’s UK Web Archive and is on the Internet Archive as well. I’m in a battle with an overstretched Typepad to download everything too. I’ve secretly always fancied the idea of a retrospective volume. It’ll be twenty years (!) in 2028, and, to be honest, the fact that the content is now no longer freely available may be the nudge we need to bring this about.

What is notable about all four of these projects is that they were already dead, declining defunct or some combination of all three. I wouldn’t say that any had a ‘legacy’; merely that they all lurked somewhere on a spectrum of digital purgatory. Typepad going under now means I need to take a more active role in shuffling them into the great beyond. To reference the immortal words of Terry Prachett’s Death, we probably should’ve left a little earlier to avoid the rush.

Quick round-up:

An actual book review! By me! The kind folks at The Fantasy Inn let me rave a bit about Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. This won’t be entirely new (I wrote about this book in this very newsletter at an earlier time!), but I think - in an era of resurgant British nationalism, it is valuable to rethink our relationship with our national myths.

Rose Biggin’s Make-Believe and Artifice is out now - you can get a fancy signed copy from the publisher, but it is also on Amazon (et al).

Shelfies passed a year, and co-host Lavie Tidhar shared his favourite shelf to celebrate.