Crucial Resource “Immigration Professors Blog” is Temporally Down, Moving to Independent Platform Soon
ImmProf Blog is down following the sudden announcement that its host TypePad will shutter at the end of September, but the blog will reemerge shortly in full swing with all past posts at immprof.com.
Since 2005, the Immigration Professor's Blog, has been a crucial source of timely information about immigration law, policy, and research, thanks primarily to the steadfast work of UC Davis Professor Kevin Johnson and, later, members of the editorial team that currently includes Ming Hsu Chen, Ingrid Eagly, Bill Hing, Kit Johnson, and myself.
But if you go to the ImmProf Blog today, that work is gone. Instead, you will be met with a blank white page, devoid of any recent or historical posts, and no rationale given for the sudden disappearance. Immigration's Library at Alexandria has disappeared.
Here's the short version of what happened and what we plan to do about it.
On August 27, Typepad announced that it would be shutting down entirely one month later on September 30, 2025. Typepad is one of the oldest until-now-still-in-use blogging platforms. Before WordPress became the go-to platform, Typepad popularized blogging for people without the technical HTML skills to write online, and for a while, it dominated the market.
Its best-known blogger, entrepreneur whisperer, Seth Godin, who has the largest blog audience in the world, wrote on Typepad from the time it launched in the early 2000s until 2018, when he left to create his own site. Godin must have seen the writing on the wall. Typepad remained admirably stable over the years but hadn't added new features in years, and by 2020 had stopped allowing new accounts altogether.
It's no great surprise, therefore, that Typepad's days were numbered. As I often preach to anyone who will listen, as long as your information is controlled by someone else, it can go away at any time. This is also where my sermon launches into the importance of backing up everything to physical drives you own and encouraging the congregation to build their own digital systems rather than relying on someone else.
However, the fact that Typepad gave its users—many of whom have remained committed to the platform for decades—barely a month's notice before complete and total self-destruction is irresponsible and inconsiderate. It has certainly left us at ImmProf scrambling to respond to questions and concerns about what's going on, whether the site will come back, and whether everything is lost. With more notice, we could have made plans and alerted people in advance; now we have to act quickly to preserve what's left and migrate to new digital territories.
It's not just us. The ImmProf Blog was part of the larger network of Law Professors Blogs, an LLC that facilitated a network of thematic legal-focused blogs run by leading experts in tax law, international law, legal technology, media law, and many more—around 100 altogether. As far as I'm aware, Paul Caron, who owns the Law Professor Blog, LLC, does not have plans to duplicate or recreate the existing blog network elsewhere. I don't blame him. Even with digital advertising across the network, projects like this typically require a lot of invisible virtual labor just to maintain the status quo. Unless another solution emerges, each blog will have to decide whether it becomes a stand-alone project or ceases to exist.
This leaves the urgent question of what will happen to existing content. Paul Caron has made historic downloads of past content available, and, thanks to Kit, we have a copy of that export file. The file is disappointing. It is a simple text (.txt) file with structured text for each blog post. That's a weird way for Typepad to do it; simple, perhaps, but nothing like the more sophisticated download options you get from modern blog platforms. The good news is, the huge 150 MB .txt file includes all posts and comments going back to 2005. The bad news is, it does not include images or other metadata, so while it does include the essentials, it is fairly sparse.
As soon as I heard that ImmProf was down, I bought the domain at immprof.com as a backup solution (the link currently redirects to the original website). It's rare to nab a short URL these days, so hopefully this is acceptable to the broader community. After some discussion as an editorial board, and in light of the lack of other more unified options for the larger network, we are charging forward to create a new independent blog that will maintain the urgency and value of the old one, recreate the historical archives of ImmProf so that nothing is lost, keep the front-end simple while use a more modern back-end blog management system, remove ads, and possibly add user-friendly features like the ability to receive regular email digests of blog posts. Our goal is to have it up and running by October 1.
Relevant Research is taking on the web development side of the project pro bono as part of its commitment to public service.
Stay tuned for more information!
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I'm wondering if there's a way to easily scrape images and post metadata from Wayback Machine? Looks like this is the most recent capture that's available, from mid-November 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241113025029/https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/
It’s good that the files are saved and readable. That’s the challenge over time. Nothing worse than an old file that can’t be opened. In my experience of saving in .txt, the icons become squares or other symbols, but at least the words are safe.