If you were to make a full move to WordPress these features could be build directly into the system. Making a migration from Typepad used to be a chore but with a new importer system it's much, much easier. The simplicity of your design, the combination of your use of Disqus, and the vast world of (quality) WP plugins would be a boon not only for your pageviews but your readers with increased opportunities for engagement, delivery, and more.

It would also shine a real-time light on your functional approach to technology and your progressive stance on investing in progressive ventures. I see nothing but a "win" all the way around.

And if you'd allow me, I'd like to do it for you just - WordPress has quite literally changed my life.

You make a compelling case. Particularly that last point

Fred,

Wanted to show you very quickly how fast and easily you could migrate to WordPress with very little downtime. Within the last 60 minutes I endeavored to showcase the core functionality that you asked for as well as spend a little time on the design aesthetic.

The point of this concept is to prove the following:

1. Technically-speaking, a migration is easy and quick.

2. Aesthetically-speaking, your design is also simple and easy to mimic and reproduce.

3. Core features (such as Archives, Disqus comments, Soundcloud embeds, etc) are also easily doable.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Your ability to customize far beyond just the Archives page, categories, and design is now a real and pragmatic possibility. Things like "infinite scroll", better out-of-the-box SEO, and compelling integrations with other technologies are just a click away (literally) which is great for users and can up pageviews like whoa.

Oh, and you could do a very sweet design "upgrade" too with the many options out there.

Simply put, using WordPress will make your more awesome, period.

Thanks for the opportunity - if anything, it'll showcase to the rest of your community how kickass WordPress really is.

~~~ Video explaining my work here (about 4 min long): https://www.youtube.com/wat...
~~~ Demo site: http://iama.vc

If you have any questions, you can contact me here (email): me@john.do

Have a great one; that was fun.

I sent you an email. Did you get it?

i did not.

Fred - here's a solution I put together. http://avctoc.herokuapp.com/

Note that I'm not copying your site, I simply put this together so you could see what it looks like.

With this solution, you can basically drop in a script and css file. Nearly plug-and-play. I pass all the posts titles and URLs as one gzipped JSON file (speeds things up). This data has been scraped from your website.

As a result, the user can navigate the TOC very quickly.

The two current downsides: Javascript in iOS is painfully slow and Google might have more difficulty indexing this page. If you want to deploy we can chat about keeping it updated (should be pretty low maintenance).

Brandon

Thanks

I will look this over this weekend

Sounds good - it's at a point that you can drop one '<script>' tag into a table of contents page and it should work.

Fred, an idea might be to place that A-Z list from Brandon's page in the right margin.

Welcome to the world of technical debt.

A place where the sole currency is frustration and the best time to deal with things is always yesterday.

lol
.
+1

What? No Geocities import tool?

Well Fred – I'd just about had a turn-key solution for you and your provider DDoS'd me. Couldn't crawl it!

Intern + Manual Labor = Mechanical Turk Solution

Time to turn on the Kevin Marshall signal.

Don't volunteer Kevin. I got shit last week for implying he could build something here. ;-)

I had the same first thought as Dave Pinsen did...

Gawk.it basically does this already (just search for MBA Mondays - you can even do just a title search if you want though it's un-documented.

Wouldn't you say Gawk.it is analogous to an Index, while fredwilson is looking for a Table of Contents?

The only option is to switch to wordpress. If that's too much work, then I favor doing nothing and letting the current situation persist.

Yup

it's not. give me 5 more minutes...

DOH!

You know, when reading AVC and clicking your heels three times while holding the shift key down reveals one of the most killer hacks I've ever put in place...can't believe you actually discovered it! :-)

Switch to hyde (i' about to start that process myself)

Because it is static and you can include disqus, you can in fact get everything you want whenever you post, plus the site load time speed would improve.

And you could write posts where there is no internet

Static site generators, at least as is currently fashionable are geek-chic, they are not solutions viable for mainstream bloggers.

Yes, site load speed is also a reason why I suggested a static site generator. It's a LOT faster for readers to load in their browsers than a regular dynamically generated blog like Blogger or Wordpress, since the templating, etc., is pre-generated on your local machine before the post is pushed to the actual site, and also, AFAIK, the post is generated again for each new viewer, though Blogger and Wordpress probably use caching. And on a site like Fred's, that gets tens of thousands (at least) of visitors, that would make even more of a difference.

But one con (as in pro/con) I see for Fred is that since he travels often, and writes posts on his mobile too, the static approach may not work easily, unless some software is written to enable him to upload his content from his mobile to, say, his PC at home/office and the software there runs the generator with the new post as input, and then publishes it on the site.

"It's a LOT faster for readers to load in their browsers than a regular dynamically generated blog like Blogger or Wordpress"

That's only true if not using a good caching plugin and n nginx server can handle all but the biggest blogs. WPEngine, ZippyKid, Synthesis, Page.ly and other WP hosts could handle all that stuff for Fred.

I read this and I think it is a heads up to every platform out there to smarten up and understand the power of plug ins.

The small shop platforms like Shopify and the rash of marketing platforms (don't get me started!) all basically suck for connecting your world together.

Fred, my 2c:

Consider / evaluate using a static site generator. There are dozens of them (google for static web site generators, some are jekyll, hyde, pelican, octopress, etc.), and some of them support Disqus comments.That shouldn't be be too difficult anyway given that Disqus comments basically involves dropping a snippet of JavaScript into your blog's HTML code / template. (Could be wrong on this, though, with the way Disqus has evolved over time.)

You could ask a friend (e.g. son/daughter (of a friend of yours) who is studying computer science) to evaluate static site generators for you and customize one of them if needed. Pay them for it. Or get a freelancer to do it. Many people use static site generators nowadays for their blogs - in preference to WordPress or Blogger or others. You would have to host it on a server, but that can be done, There are also options like Github Pages.

Might or not work out for all your needs (e.g. blog spam), just thought of the idea.

I'm a long time fan of WordPress.

I know Fred didn't put this up for a vote :) but if he did, my vote on "should Fred 'just do it' and move to WordPress" would be NO.

I used b2 before WordPress was forked from it, and I've used WP and developed themes and plugins and custom functions for it since the very early days. I agree with most of the comments here about how "powerful" it can be - one can use it to set up so much more than "just a blog."

But I usually do not recommend a move to WordPress without a serious discussion of the issues involved.

If you ask me - and one of you did in an email :) - moving a high-profile, heavy-traffic, long-lived site like AVC should be handled by a professional.

I posted a longer version of my opinion at http://48.bsoi.st/

You nailed it, Bill.

Thanks.

Amid all the WordPress discussion last week, I neglected to address the original point - creating a table of contents.

http://bsoist.smallpict.com...

fredwilson

It's pretty cool to see how much people care about a mans blog.
cc/ fredwilson

i agree!

I have used Wordpress extensively for the past year and my biggest beef with it is the limitations imposed by each theme. Sometimes it gets very frustrating when a seemingly simple change is not doable because it is not supported by the theme. However, their large support community and extensive plugs make it still one of the best choices!

Fred, it may be possible to set that up with yahoo pipes,maybe..depends upon what new improvements yahoo did to pipes

Thanks this is wonderful.

You know you could always get *someone else* to move your site to WordPress...

Yeah but who makes the decisions on the questions that come up

You can hire someone but you still have to manage them

"who makes the decisions"

In a sense you are in the same shoes as the typical main street small businessman with something like this.

One of the things I learned back in the 80's when I was in printing - that allowed me to charge more than competitors that had better quality and been around since the 1930's - was that we did all the thinking for customers.

Our competitors would drop off 3 paper sample books.

We would give them 3 paper samples and say "choose from these". No paralysis.

It was quick and easy. (Same with ink and a host of other decisions). "This is what you want to do" worked very well.

One thing that stops small business people dead in the tracks is having to read, think and make decisions.

Sounds like you're trying to disrupt the ebook business which just disrupted the physical book business. I could see a market for this sort of thing for authors to publish serials or related short stories and host them on their own site to increase engagement with their readers.

Books are a thing of the past just as CDs and records are

Note: After reading the other posts on
this thread, I conclude that they have
much better approaches taking advantage of
other high level, blog specific software
and my approach is at way too low a level.

Standard 'architectural' issue in
computing. First cut, there are three
approaches:

(1) The old 'batch' architecture had
programs to process millions of
'instances', 'cases', or 'records'.

(2) The Xerox PARC 'graphical user
interface' (GUI), 'direct manipulation',
manual architecture could be terrific for
a user to do something once or a half
dozen times after they had learned how the
GUI worked from some experiments with
maybe two dozen 'instances'.

(3) Then when want to do something a few
dozen, hundred, or thousand times, maybe
automatically once a day, want a way to
get past all that clicking, clicking,
clicking of the GUI approach and, instead,
get access to APIs or just automating the
clicking. For this usually the easy way
to develop the software is with some
really easy to use interpretive
programming language since the factor of
10 or so slower execution compared with
the more efficient compiled languages
doesn't hurt much with the assumed modest
data volumes and since the software
development can be much easier.

On Windows, and before on OS/2 and MS/DOS,
my favorite scripting language has been
Rexx, written by IBM's Mike Cowlishaw in
England and long the main means of
programming the 'server virtual machines'
that long were the foundation of nearly
all the internal office computing in IBM.
Also the main text editor on VM/CMS was
XEDIT (written by an IBM guy in France),
and its macro language was also Rexx thus
making that text editor quite powerful.

My favorite text editor, and most heavily
used program, much like XEDIT, is KEdit
written by Mansfield Software in CT, and
its macro language is their version of
Rexx.

Broadly an interpretive language like
Rexx, a 'scripting' language, can be
powerful when used for editor macros,
macros for other compiled programs,
command line commands, or 'batch'
programs.

Since there is an easy way to get to
TCP/IP in Rexx, a little program in Rexx
is my usual way to download, say, 50 PDF
files or 200 HTML files.

Rexx is elegant; Cowlishaw did a good job.

Likely now on Windows, for a major
fraction of 'scripting', Microsoft's
PowerShell would be a better foundation
for the future; I intend to convert to
PowerShell for that fraction.

Then, for Fred's program, first cut, what
would be involved would be to (1) have a
way to get the URLs of the relevant
AVC.COM Web pages, (2) for each Web page,
read the 'static' HTML (assuming that the
crucial information is in static HTML
instead of generated by JavaScript), (3)
do a string search for some syntactically
distinctive key phrases, e.g., "MBA
Mondays", maybe tagged as 'metadata', (4)
accumulate a table of contents (TOC), (5)
write the TOC to some appropriate file,
maybe as JavaScript, so that the Web page
code that will display the TOC as HTML can
find and use that file.

But that would be just a first cut. In
time more might be desired. E.g., might
want a log file to have a record of each
time the program ran and some indications
of its success or failure as it stopped,
check for a likely long list of possible
in principle exceptional conditions and
report them, say, via the log file or
more, make the code more general to make
something of a little, general purpose
'search' tool that reports one TOC for
each 'search', etc. But with 'lean'
software development, we "release early
and release often", right?

"Be wise. Generalize." Is there
something general enough here in both the
problem and the solution for a promising
startup? I doubt it. One reason is that
usually it is easier for one person at one
site to write their own little script than
to make use of some much more general
program written by others.

Actually, if make the project closer to
something solid as production software,
then, assuming want to run on Windows,
really should depend heavily on
Microsoft's .NET Framework and use one of
Microsoft's compiled programming languages
that work well with both the .NET
Framework and also the Windows Common
Language Runtime (CLR). For that will
need, ballpark, a cubic foot of books and
about 4000 Web pages of documentation from
Microsoft's MSDN.

So, one reason to use an interpretive
language, e.g., Rexx, and keep things
simple, just dirt simple, we're talking no
moving parts can opener simple, is to
avoid the cubic foot of books and finding
and learning the 4000 Web pages of
documentation. Then if see TOCs and they
appear to be as intended, likely
everything is okay, and assume it is. If
a TOC doesn't look right or don't see it,
then assume that something is wrong and
investigate.

I write the code? Since my little project
doesn't need much more code, enough for
Fred's TOC project would do some
significant good for my project as a real
business!

But as I recall, back there, maybe in
January, 2012, there was something of a
New Year's resolution to learn to code?
Right?

Uh, people who respond to requests for
software with a lot of 'architectural hand
waving' and no code are called 'advisory
programmers' or worse! Such people
'mentor' and give 'advice', right?

Godin and you are the last two (that I read) left on Typepad. Seems like Godin will be the last man standing soon.

Only if the commenters get their way

I suspect you'll be glad they did

i'm considering investing in blogging myself (meaning that i will begin writing a blog), and the options appear to be to use either typepad or wordpress. wp seems to have the market share, but i'm wondering if tp devotees know something that i don't that stops them switching to the market leader (which they will because i know nothing about either option)?

Once i start with a platform i'm not going to switch, and so i'd like to get the choice right from the get go. Fred, is there a reason why you chose tp over wp?

I started this blog in 2003

of its time, and times change - as you said, be relevant.

it's the two year rule - only as good as the last two years. before that is no longer relevant.

"but i'm wondering if tp devotees know something that i don't that stops them switching to the market leader"

Switching involves making decisions and doing something. There are things to think about. You have to put the effort into actually doing it.

If you have little time you have to carve out time which you may not want to do. Simply reading the instructions and understanding what you need to do takes time. And making sure you don't overlook an important step and mess up.

One of the ways to make money in business is to take things that others don't want to think about, that they only need to do once, and come up with a fair charge to handle that thing for them turn key.

Or something they know about but would rather outsource to someone who does it more efficiently or more frequently.

(One of the problems of course is coming up with the right person to do the thing you don't have time to do. That's something that unfortunately takes time as well.)

Correct