Caveat Lector

O ye who have TypePad or many other third-party-hosted blogs: I hope you don’t think you can move anything but your words. You can’t, not legally.

I went digging through TypePad’s terms of service to see how feasible it would be for the repository to pick up a blog hosted there that’s written by some grad students at MPOW. I found what I expected to find, which was discouraging enough: TypePad owns its designs, and one needs “express written permission” to do anything with them.

So what the heck, I sent them email inquiring about said permissions, and explaining why I wanted them. The answer was a flat no. I can ask the blog authors to export their stuff (I don’t know what TypePad exports into; I suspect it’d be something like the old MovableType flat-text file), and I can futz with said stuff to get it back into HTML, and I can build my own design around that. But I can’t archive TypePad’s HTML/CSS.

I hope they’ve got an Atom export. I truly do. I’d far rather work with that than try to build a MT-flat-file-to-HTML hack all on my ownsome.

In any case, I’m not pleased. Let this be a warning to libraries using services like TypePad: don’t put anything there unless you’re willing to redesign it from the ground up for archival or use on another system.