Yesterday I received the following email from Typepad, the blogging service on which this blog is built:
It's not a total shock, though it is a shock. I've known for some time that Typepad was not doing well. WordPress long ago surpassed them in customer numbers, and I doubt their respective counts are within an order of magnitude of each other. They quit taking new subscribers a few years ago, which was probably a sign that the illness was fatal, but I foolishly hoped the platform would survive on the revenue from existing customers as a division of some bigger company.
It really was a foolish hope, and I guess I knew it. I've been in and around the software business for forty years, so I knew how that story was likely to end. But I didn't want to deal with it. Light On Dark Water started as a hand-coded web site in 2004, moved to Blogger a couple of years later, and then (for technical reasons) to Typepad around 2010. That conversion took a fair amount of work, and all the comments were lost, which was pretty sad, as there had been some great conversations.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I had seriously considered ending the blog at the end of 2023, which would have been an even 20 years. And I was pretty close to a final decision to do it at the end of this year. There are two main reasons: I'm not enjoying it as much as I once did, and there aren't as many readers and commenters as there once were–the two things are directly and closely connected. Blogs in general have long since ceased to be fashionable or popular, ever since Facebook, Twitter/X, and all the other "social media" took over. I felt that both the blog and I were running out of steam. I'm 76 years old, closer to 77. It seems to take me longer to write substantial posts than it used to, and I strongly suspect that I don't write as well as I did.
But when I thought of doing that I didn't envision the whole thing just vanishing. I had in mind that the 22 years of material–millions of words–would still be online, at least for a while. They wouldn't be lost–I can and do periodically export the entire contents to one huge text file, as a backup. And one of my children did me a great favor a few years ago by writing a program that reads the site and puts everything into a well-structured and very searchable database. But Typepad made a change in 2023 that prevents that from working and would be very difficult, maybe impossible, to work around. I can write a similar program that would take that one huge text file and similarly parse everything out into a database, and I intend to. But that, obviously, wouldn't be public.
Both WordPress and Substack have tools which might convert the Typepad data to their format. I've looked at them briefly and it would take some work just to get comfortable with their tools. I don't know if I want to do that.
So. Most likely this is the end. There may be a few more posts before the end of September, but I won't be writing the next two I had planned, on Nicholas Nickleby and Mahler's Sixth Symphony. So here are my one-sentence opinions on both:
Nicholas Nickleby is early Dickens, maybe even more melodramatic and sentimental than some of his later work, not his best but very enjoyable.
Mahler's Sixth is a monster in two senses: huge and scary, difficult even for those who love Mahler, but very much worth the effort.
Light On Dark Water 
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