DanThornton

Tech, Geekery, Pop Culture, Miscellaneous

And now Typepad is shutting down

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It feels a lot like I’m writing a eulogy for the Web 2.0 era at the moment. Some of my more recent posts have been about the closure of Ello, Keen and Tastebuds.fm. And now Typepad is shutting down at the end of the month.

Originally launched in 2003, Typepad was a simple blogging platform, along the lines of Blogger (launched in 1999), and the hosted version of WordPress (also 2005). Launched by Six Apart, it’s currently owned by Endurance International Group, who also own Bluehost, Hostgator, Yoast SEO and lots more.

And now Typepad is shutting down
And now Typepad is shutting down

I’ve never really used Typepad myself, having gone from Blogger in my very early days to self-hosted WordPress. But after finally starting to go back through old posts and archives on my sites in a bit of housekeeping, it’s noticeable how many people I know who used it ‘back in the day’.

And there are a number of people posting that they’ve experienced issues trying to export their content to upload to other platforms at the moment. That’s causing some stress with the deadline of September 30th, 2025 for Typepad to be completely shut.

It’s sad for anyone that loses their archive, and the fact that it adds to the huge amount of link rot on the internet. If you’re using a standard .typepad.com URL, then you won’t be able to redirect it, and even many of the people using custom domains years ago have either let them lapse, or not put any redirects in place (intentionally or not) meaning that anything mentioning those old articles will be broken.

Letting old content disappear is even encouraged as part of pruning sites, reducing crawl budgets etc. And it’s certainly something which can produce benefits for search rankings, but at the same time as someone who values history it’s sad to see somewhere between 30-50% of pages and links disappear over the course of a decade.

I’d always recommend self-hosting any site, as it gives you much more control over the domain and host, especially if you make sure you’re constantly backing up and exporting everything. And it’s pretty cheap – you can always give me a shout for cost-effective solutions.

And if you are pruning old content, you should always try and redirect anything with value to a relevant page/post that will still be operational.

That includes your entire domain if you’ve decided to rebrand etc, otherwise you might find yourname.com becomes a home of casino spam etc. Sometimes hidden amongst legitimate articles, or alternatively just replacing whatever was there before.

It’s also sad to see so many longstanding Web 2.0 era services slowly disappear. Even at the time, a lot of startups didn’t make it past their early months, but in 2025 it feels like many of the social web aspects have disappeared in favour of a tiny number of walled gardens operated by a handful of monolyths, just as in traditional print, film, TV etc. While I’m still hopeful and optimistic about the Fediverse, it feels that if younger internet users are spoonfed everything by the likes of Google, Apple, Meta, ByteDance and xAI, then they’ll never realise the joy of creating and owning your projects, connecting with people outside of closed networks, building and collaborating, and all the stuff that made the internet a fun and inspiring place.

Promoting Peterborough STEM Festival 2025 With Slime

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How do you encourage kids of all ages to enjoy science, technology, engineering and maths? In my case, it’s by volunteering for a few hours of promoting Peterborough STEM Festival 2025 with slime.

The Peterborough campus of Anglia Ruskin University held a Family Day with various attractions and displays, and with the free 2025 Peterborough STEM Festival taking place on October 18th at ARU, we were invited along.

And while lots of things may have changed since holding our first STEM Festival back in 2016, the attraction of making slime is as strong as ever. In just a few hours, we estimated more than 200 children had spent some time experimenting with different amounts of common chemicals and food safe washable colourings to create their own pot of slime.

Promoting Peterborough STEM Festival 2025 With Slime - Dan and Andy
Me and fellow organiser/volunteer Andy promoting Peterborough STEM Festival with slime

The four of us manning the stall (me, Andy, Liz and Stanley), barely had time to breath before another request came for a pot of glue, some bicarbonate of soda and shaving foam, or a particular colouring.

And amongst the fun, and managing to be the one person who turned his own hands blue (and various kids comparing me to a smurf for the rest of the day), there are a few more serious aspects to slime-making.

Kids will happily ignore their smartphones etc if you give them something interesting, fun and entertaining to do. Especially when you explain that it’s fine when things don’t work out first time, and experiments often don’t succeed straight away.

And there’s a bigger need for these kinds of events than ever before. When a lot of education has gone back to rote learning, children are being led by AI, apps and algorithms, and concerns about safety means they’re less independent, having the permission to muck around and fail can be eye-opening.

It’s tougher than ever to find suitable venues, funding and volunteers, so if you want to support Peterborough STEM Festival or any of our smaller fringe events, don’t hestitate to get involved. You don’t need a PhD to volunteer, and your hands will be back to a normal colour within a few hours.

Tastebuds.fm shuts down today

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It seems that my blog is becoming a grave site for various niche sites that sprang up during what might be increasingly referred to as the ‘golden age’ of the world wide web, before AI slop, when social networks were fun, and the current monopolies hadn’t completely taken over. There was Ello, Keen (which harked back to social sharing sites), and now Tastebuds.fm shuts down today.

Launched back in 2010, the idea was that you could meet people and date by importing lists of your favourite music from Spotify, Last.fm (which I’m happy to say is still going at the moment, 18 years and 101,798 songs after I first joined) and Facebook.

Tastebuds.fm shuts down today

Having signed up around 13 years ago, it’s one of those services that seemed like a really good idea but never really seemed to catch hold with enough people. I’ve dipped in an out over the years, mainly when single, but never enough for it to become a habit. Possibly because it straddled an odd line between being a social network, and a dating site.

The places I’ve lived over the last decade aren’t exactly in the middle of nowhere, but there never seemed to be enough local people talking about upcoming gigs. And being in a relationship, the dating side became irrelevant, meaning I’ve only logging in a handful of times in the last few years, mainly just to check out the bands and songs I’d listed on my profile in the past to see how my tastes have changed.

Judging by various comments around the web, most people seem to feel a similar way, although there are some nice stories of people meeting their significant other through the service.

Tastebuds.fm shuts down today

It’s not the first website or business I’ve seen close, especially given how much Google has done to launch and shutter services of the years (or the loss of ThisIsMyJam back in 2015, which hit harder at the time). But seeing various people shutter their projects feels different now, especially when I’ve had accounts with them for more than a decade, and the rollout of AI is changing the nature of the internet. I’ve let a couple of side projects quietly fade out of existence already this year, and there are some more that won’t auto-renew in the future.

I do wonder if it’s just the fact I’m getting older, but talking to my son, people at DPiP and online, there’s a malais and melancholy which seems pretty broadly shared across generations for how things were.

So while I probably won’t be mourning the loss of Tastebuds.fm on a regular basis, it’s always a shame to see services disappear, and it hits a little harder than it would have done a few years ago.