What’s Happened To The Online Photographer’s Blog Site? I Have The Answer!

Being a avid reader of The Online Photographer blog, Mike Johnston, the proprietor, editor, chief bottle washer and writer extraordinaire, recently told us readers that TypePad, the host of his blog, was shutting down the service at the end of September.  Mike, not quite in a panic yet but understanding what a task is ahead, outlined his plan for migrating his site to a new host.

Today, I noticed The Online Photographer had completely disappeared from the internet with no explanation.  What happened?  So, I emailed Mike (I’m proud to say I’ve known him personally for several years) and offered to be a conduit to any of his readers who are also my readers and relay information about what is going on and what progress he is making.

Mike emailed me today and wrote the following:

“ Hi Friends... You're a current or past paid member of my Patreon account which is why you're getting this. 

The Online Photographer (TOP) is currently, well, offline. On August 27th, Typepad, our home of 17 years, announced it would be closing on September 30th. Pretty tight window already. But then, Typepad's servers evidently crashed yesterday (Thursday) afternoon a little before 5 p.m. Eastern.

Here's the tl;dr: If I get everything done and manage to relaunch TOP, the way you'll find it will be to go to: theonlinephotographer.com That's my domain, which I own. Either from now (9/6/25) or from 9/30/25, whichever it turns out to be, all the old links to theonlinephotographer.typepad.com will simply deadend at an error message, and anyone looking for me that way will assume I am kaput. Currently, my domain is pointed at Typepad, and it's going to take a while (like three weeks if all goes smoothly) to build a new site, so theonlinephotographer.com might not work until October sometime. But that will be where to check. When the new site goes up, that will be how to find it. 

And when that time comes, I'll need help spreading the word. Meanwhile, Kirk Tuck has volunteered to pass news along on Visual Science Lab, starting with this:https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2025/09/news-from-michael-johnston-aka.html So that's that. If Typepad doesn't resurrect in a day or two, I will get an "under construction" page up at theonlinephotographer,com. 

Let's hope it's darkest before the dawn. Oddly, typepad.com is still up, but, as one friend who is helping me with this transition wrote, "all Typepad blogs are now responding with a HTTP 503 error. Either they've taken the site offline for maintenance, or, more likely, lots more people are freaking out about their content and between the standard export requests and the non-standard archival scraping (i.e. Sitesucker or relentless 'Save As Complete Web Page' clicking) the servers are getting pummeled." That sounds about right to me, as I had been doing all four of those things—making standard Export requests (all failed), scraping with Sitesucker, making repeated 'Save as Complete Web Page' requests, and, yup, freaking out. 

Trouble is, right now I'm sitting on a $$$ estimate from a website developer to create a new version of TOP as a self-hosted (actually the developer would host it) Wordpress org blog. I'd at least get to specify everything I wanted and have it work and look the way I've always wanted it to. I have very specific ideas after doing this for close to 20 years. The problem there is that the developer was going to spend this weekend analyzing the cost of migrating the old site to the new one. That cost could be anything from trivial to astronomical, "depending." Their current estimate of costs is WITHOUT that crucial element. (It's crucial because all that old content would influence the Google ranking of the new site.) So, will Typepad get its act together and bring TOP and all the other Typepad sites back online till the 30th as originally promised? So my developer can analyze/attempt a content migration? Or will the outage simply be allowed to continue because they're closing it down anyway, and all of us loyal bloggers can go hang? No way to know at the present time. They used to keep a Twitter (X) account to communicate with us during downtimes, but that got shut down. Prematurely, obviously. So I don't really know whether I should commit to hiring the developer or not. 

The Typepad team was always good to me, by the way. I assume they are taking orders from higher up and might not really be able to do as they wish. 

Closing down with one month and three day's notice was already a crisis, albeit one that might have been manageable had everything gone as expected. But the server crash yesterday could make it a disaster. On the other hand, I've scrambled before. I brought my five-day-old son home on less than 24 hours notice, having never fed a baby, burped a baby, or changed a diaper in my life. i should be able to handle this...right? I'm talking to myself. Onward. No, let's make that...ONWARD!!! :-) 

As ever, and especially now, thank you for your support. —Mike”

There you are.  Information straight from the man himself.  If mike forwards more information, I will surely post it for him.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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