Over the weekend I finally found the time to do something I've intended to do for a while. I moved my blog over to my own domain and in so doing switched from TypePad to Blogger.
Let me be perfectly clear, I have nothing against TypePad, I've been using it quite happily for a number of years now, and it's never been anything but awesome. When it comes right down to it though I'm just not blogging nearly as much as I used to, so seeing that charge on my credit card every month really started to make less and less sense. Blogger is free, so that simplified the decision making process.
Amusingly enough, I actually tried to do this for the first time a few months back, but I found there to be a surprising lack of software for migrating a blog from a MovableType style blog (TypePad lets you export your data in MT format) to Blogger. I spent a fair amount of time trying to throw something together to do it, but I ended up never being quite happy with the result, and I eventually timed out on it.
Fortunately, if you procrastinate long enough on a software project it's uncanny how often someone else will solve your problem for you. On Friday I happened to see a blog post announcing the Google Blog Converters project, which lets you convert between the import/export formats of a variety of different blogging systems. Its MT to Blogger functionality worked just fine, and after a little fixing up of some formatting issues (some of which were actually sitting around from back when I converted from blosxom to TypePad) all my data made it over to Blogger quite nicely.
Anyway, I'll leave the TypePad blog up for the next few weeks, since I've paid through the beginning of February, but the cannonical home for my blog is now at http://blog.electricjellyfish.net/, and I'm now a happy Blogger user.
