As some readers may know, the blogging service Typepad is complete shutting down as of September 30, 2025. When I first started this blog back in May 2004(!), Typepad seemed like a good-enough, user-friendly platform, and before long I had the assistance of then-Professor Paul Caron and his then-new Law Professor Blog Network to help with the look and functionality of this space. Now, 21 years later with this blog old enough to drink, the technology has continued to function well enough and has been comfortably familiar so as to leave me content with its dated charms. But Typepad is about to go dark, so I am forced to change.
For weeks since hearing about Typepad’s coming demise, I have been thinking about whether to continue “traditional” blogging and about other platforms. I was intrigued now-Dean Paul Caron decided to just stop blogging after all this time. Meanehile, I have very much enjoyed helping to start the Sentencing Matters Substack last year. I might just shift my time and energy to more posting there, though I tend to view that platform as a place for longer-form essays rather than the shorter postings that have generally comprised this blog. Thus, at least to preserve older postings and explore newer technologies, I have been working on migrating this blog to a new space.
The folks at LexBlog this week helped me preserve all my old posts in a new space here (regular readers likely realize I have not been blogging as usual as I explore migration). Yesterday, I took the new platform for a spin with three new posts at the LexBlog locale:
- Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing releases “A Comprehensive Study of Veterans Involved in the Criminal Justice System”
- “Trapped in Time: The Silent Crisis of Elderly Incarceration”
- “Crime and Punishment Across America: A 50 State Legislative Analysis”
I am not particularly happy with the look or functionality of the new platform. But I have not yet been “trained” on the technology; I am hoping in the coming weeks and months I can replicate/improve key features from this old Typepad space. But it quite possible I will turn out to be an old blogging dog that is not especially good at learning new technology tricks. And, of course, I have a day job keeping me quite busy, and thus a (lengthy?) blogging hiatus may be unavoidable.
That all said, in the waning days of this platform, I welcome any and all reader comments on what features of this blog may be worth trying to preserve on another platform. I have long been very grateful to all those who have read and commented in this space through the years, and I am eager for input on what might be worth trying to preserve in these trying times.