I’ve decided to bite the bullet and start converting some of my Typepad blogs over to Wordpress. I just really miss the flexibility of Wordpress on my Typepad sites.

The hard part will be converting with permalinks intact, so that I won’t mess up my search engine results.

I found an excellent tutorial on converting from Typepad to Wordpress, and I’ve already started the process. I’m using one of my small blogs as the guinea pig. This blog is a hobby blog that doesn’t make any money and doesn’t have a whole lot of visitors, so if I mess anything up, it’s not going to be particularly tragic.

One of the comments pointed out a problem with using the “lastn” parameter in the export file that Adam provides. The hack provided in the comment wasn’t that appealing to me - showing all the posts on the front page - because most of my blogs have in excess of 300 posts.

But I took a look around, and I found the proper parameter to use: sort_order=”descend”. I’ve already tested this, and it works.

So that was one hurdle out of the way.

One thing I’m not too certain about is why Adam had “adam” in his old Typepad permalink structure. It must be that you can add a Typepad blog to a folder once you’ve done the domain mapping thing. Which is an interesting proposition and one that’s worth further exploration (I intend to keep my Typepad account - I’m not moving all of my blogs). But I am hoping that the mod_rewrite code will still work, as long as I remove the “adam” from it, and from the path in the new importer file he provides.

I’ve already started the process by changing over the nameservers for this one particular blog. Once that’s done, I’ll pop in and go under the hood, so to speak. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one, for sure.