eclecticism

January 26th, 2005 |

A few months back, after having been a happy user of Six Apart’s TypePad service for about a year and a half, I decided that I wanted to go back to having the finer level of control and options that Movable Type would offer, and moved my weblog back onto my own server. I made sure to make the move a couple months before my TypePad subscription ended, so that I would have time to move all my files over and off of their servers before I got locked out of my account.

Today I got a comment notification from my TypePad site. This was a bit surprising, as my account should have died in December. When I bounced over to the TypePad site, though, I was able to log in without a problem. Starting to wonder if I’d been stupid, I checked the Account status page.

Oh, dammit.

Sure enough, I’d made sure to save my credit card information and turn on auto-renewal at some point, and TypePad had very obligingly signed me up for another year of service in December. Me being my usual brilliant self with finances had never noticed this (in itself actually not a bad thing, though — I’m still far below where I’d like to be, but if I can take a $120 hit to my bank account without it causing major issues, things are definitely improving). I checked the TypePad FAQ, and sure enough, no refunds if you’ve paid in advance. Ah, well, that was what I expected anyway.

So now I’ve got a TypePad account that I’m not using that’s all paid up and useable until next December. What in the world do I do with that? I’ve discovered over time that I don’t do well trying to keep up with posting on multiple weblogs, so starting a second weblog just doesn’t seem like a realistic option. I don’t want to move back to TypePad — not only would that be a fairly major pain, but I don’t want to lose some of the extras I have with Movable Type that TypePad doesn’t offer. I use [Flickr][5] for my photos now, so a photoblog isn’t really necessary.

[5]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/djwudi/ Flickr: Photos from djwudi”

Prairie suggested I try selling it on Ebay, but there’s hassles with that. While I could probably delete most of my personal information, the URL for the site is djwudi.typepad.com, and I don’t want to hand the ‘djwudi’ name off to someone else — until I actually started using my full name regularly, ‘djwudi’ was my normal online ID, and I still use it in [quite a few places][7].

[7]: http://www.google.com/search?q=djwudi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Google for ‘djwudi’”

I guess I’ll just keep it around in case something really strikes my fancy and seems like a realistic project. No point in canceling it, as long as it’s paid up through the year, at least.

“World Window (Fusion)” by Haujobb from the album Industrial Mix Machine (1997, 4:37).

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5 Responses to “I hate it when I’m stupid”

Mike Harris Says:
January 26th, 2005 at 8:05 pm

Maybe:

Q. Can my TypePad site have its own domain like example.com? A. Yes, we have a feature called domain mapping which allows you to point any domain name that you own at your TypePad site. We do not currently offer domain name registration services within TypePad, but there are many providers who do. If you’re looking for a provider to host your domain name and are interested in using TypePad, we’ll provide a list of requirements that your registrar should meet to be compatible with domain mapping.

Looks like that you can’t change your user name, though.

John Hoke Says:
January 27th, 2005 at 6:47 am

Just set it up to automagickaly redirect here … I know you can’t use .htaccess at typepad, but you can use an HTTP Refresh with 0 seconds at the top of the pages

Then will then end up at your main page …

kirsten Says:
January 27th, 2005 at 11:06 am

if you signed up for a pro account (which I imagine you did) you could start a community weblog. I realize those can die pretty easily, but if you came up with a good concept and solicited good authors, you might just have something usable.

Alternatively (or additionally) you could use the space for a year-long project that would reside there until your account runs out. Once that happens, you could move it onto your regular server. I like this idea a lot actually, and you could do it by yourself or get people to help.

Too bad about the auto-renewal. losing $120 sucks.

Hey, I will probably be visiting your ass in April (well, okay, the rest of you too). I’ll let you know dates when they’re more concrete, but it would be somewhere between the 8th and the 12th, I think.

Mike Harris Says:
January 27th, 2005 at 1:49 pm

Mike, one other thing. Very often, companies are willing to make exceptions to their rules. You might want to go ahead and give it a try: nothing to lose and $120 to gain, right? If you wanted to be sneaky, you could point out that you’re the Famous Guy Who Was Fired from Microsoft for His Blog. Just kiddin’, of course. But it’d be good P.R. for them.

Michael Hanscom Says:
January 29th, 2005 at 9:07 am

Actually, I woke up this morning to an unexpected e-mail. I don’t want to go into details just yet, but there may be an unexpected end to this tale of woe after all…