20 years of blogging on Typepad has come to an end: Ghost is my new platform

Started 20 years ago, my former Typepad-blog has been key to career success as a journalist and to building a great network and community with amazing bloggers and others.

My Typepad-blog has been instrumental in landing me jobs and commissions; in getting acquainted with all sorts of wonderful people and ideas; it has been quoted by international and national media and by other bloggers I value immensely; it’s been an invaluable back up for my brain – and now it’s all coming to an end, at least on this platform.

Typepad is shutting down at the end of this month, accidentally the very same month this blog was established on Typepad 20 years ago (September 2005).

So, I will be moving this blog to Ghost here – and at least parts of the blog archive.

My Typepad-blog was set up for me by a friend, in September 2005, who told me to just get blogging, and I was a bit surprised that it turned into a blog mostly on media, tech and social media – on the ever-evolving media landscape.

At first, I thought it might be a blog about current affairs, and it took a few months until I wrote a post I didn’t just delete (until January 2006). But then I slowly found my voice and my favourite topics, and to some extent this corresponded with when my journalism career took off.

The following years were exciting times for social media, media innovation, media mergers & acquisitions, freesheet wars, social media journalism and more.

And this blog, and many now defunct or no longer useful online tools, proved immensely valuable for covering my beats as a media and tech journalist (tools such as Technorati and Ice rocket, RSS-readers, Friend Feed, Twitter etc).  

As such, this blog contains quite a bit of useful media- and social media history, and has, as mentioned, also been a very useful back-up for my brain.

So, I will be moving parts of that blog archive to Ghost, but for obvious reasons many of the links are long since broken and Typepad only provide a text-back-up.

It’s been on the cards for a while that Typepad was likely to shut down, I’ve secured my back-ups but have postponed moving platforms as I was so fond of the URL I have on Typepad: kristinelowe.blogs.com – it’s been perfect.

I’ve also been very fond of Typepad: It once had a thriving blog community and had excellent support.

But life got in the way of blogging as much as I liked in later years - and to paying better attention to the deterioration of the platform.

The first thing that shifted my attention was success and other projects:

I co-founded the Norwegian Online News Association (NONA) with Helge Øgrim in 2008, served as the organisation’s first president for a few years there and started blogging quite a bit for NONA (I served NONA in various roles until 2017). I was also paid to blog for various online newspapers, including writing a tech blog for VG.no.

It was amazing to get many exciting opportunities to work in the intersection between traditional media, social media and technology, and I’m very grateful for all those paid commissions and jobs.

But slowly blogging turned into work, at times even feeling like an obligation. And then in the aftermath of the twin terror attack in Oslo and on Utøya 22.07.2011, I moved from working in journalism to science communication.

But that inner media junkie was and is still there, it’s just become mingled with lots of other passions.

Other passions include topics such a neuroscience, science communication, academic freedom, AI, trauma, nervous system regulation, change management – and books.

Always books, that has been a constant through it all.

Current deep interests include journalism and trauma, neuroscience and mental bandwidth (how to use neuroscience to work more effectively).  

I also have a WordPress-blog, established in 2008, that has sort of evolved to be a bilingual blog mostly on books.

But WordPress has had its own bit in trouble in recent times, it feels unsafe to move this Typepad blog there – so I’m testing Ghost (as so enthusiastically recommended by Adam Tinworth).

It feels like a bit of a conundrum how platforms shut down or die, not at least including media and the content management systems (CMS) they run on.

Broken links of course has a lot to with media (and blogs) shutting down or changing CMS solutions frequently, so I have the same worries about what online platform might be safe to store those media clips that feel important enough to keep and be able to link to as I do with blog archives.

A few years ago, I thought I’d move some of my work as a journalist, columnist & science communicator to WordPress, but now it seems smart that I never got around to put too much effort into that project.

But Ghost next for this blog at least…   

By the way: Migrating my Typepad-blog to Ghost via Wordpress was suprisingly easy, but I haven't yet had the time to go through everything properly.

As of writing it looks like like the comments didn't migrate to Ghost (but they did migrate to an existing Wordpress-blog of mine and are certainly part of the export file from Typepad). Images? Will need to go through that better, but in either case I mostly have back-ups of key images. Will look more into this and tidy up more when time allows. Also, the import from Wordpress contains a few Norwegian media articles of mine related to topics I blogged about a lot at the time.