TypePad (from SixApart) wisely has offered a 31 day free trial blog, and that was enough to get me to open an account, play around with the site look and feel, and then port laboriously all my existing content over to see whether I like it enough to pay them cash monies for it and have them take over control of my http://www.myshoggoth.com/ domain.
I like the look and feel I've gotten so far, it is pretty close to my original and retains the simple and readable style I was going for. I can't get as fancy in some respects, although they seem to give me the ability to download/upload their styles.css directly so that might be a good way to get around any UI limitations.
I still need to try out the Photo Albums, TypeLists, and archiving ability, but things are looking fairly good right now. A very bad sign was that last night while moving posts over all of typepad.com went off the net for 20-30 minutes. Other people's blogs that were on TypePad, their main site, the whole thing. Talking to some friends they aren't maybe known for reliable uptime...
Porting the content was a huge pain, why their 'Import/Export' functionality isn't able to work from an RSS/Atom feed blows my mind. There's a standard, why not use it?
My main website host (pair.com) offers Movable Type as well, so if TypePad proves to be too flaky I might be able to move everything including looks over relatively painlessly, and for less money per month.
One thing I'm certain of is that Windows Live Spaces is not going to work for me, so now I've moved away from CityDesk self-publishing and WL Spaces, and I'm not really interested in writing my own although that has been tempting in the past, so it looks to me like the choice really is between typepad.com hosting or pair.com hosting Movable Type.
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