Spotlight: Family Friendly Summer Projects

Each week, we scout for great posts in our Typepad Showcase that fit a particular theme and are guaranteed to inspire. Summer vacation is right around the corner, which means school's out, and cookouts are in! This week, we've rounded up some great posts that will help you get your family ready and rocking with plenty of projects - just click through the photos to check 'em out!

Let's get to work!

Over at Family Bites, Jan has put together 29 Secrets to Simple Summer Entertaining, covering everything from cooking to decorating to making it fun, easy, and kid friendly!

James is cooking up some fresh, homemade ketchup that's sure to knock the socks off your cookout guests! Head over to Bleubird Vintage for the goods:

In a gardening mood? Join us over at The Wearwithal, where Stephanie is teaching us how to DIY our very own Wood Scrap Planter:

And Jean at The Artful Parent brings us the how-to for pretty, super kid-friendly "stained glass" flower crowns and necklaces!

We hope you enjoyed this week's roundup of fantastic Typepad blogs! Check out more great blogs right here. Interested in joining the Typepad Showcase? Submit your blog today - you might just see yourself in the spotlight!

Typepad 101: This or that?

Typepad offers a lot of features - this we know - but sometimes you may not know which of those features to use for what you're trying to accomplish. We're here to help!

Post or Page?

Pages are used for static content - contact pages, biographies, lists of links that you don't want to include in your sidebar, etc. You might update or correct it on occasion but it's not timely like a blog post. You can use Pages for supplemental information for your blog or use a series of Pages to create a traditional site, all on Typepad. We've used that concept to build our Knowledge Base - everything you see uses Typepad's Pages feature.

Posts are timely, so they're included in your blog's RSS feed, while Pages are not. Another benefit to Posts is that you can organize them using the Categories feature to help your readers find related topics more easily. Pages stand alone and aren't linked to one another so we recommend using categorized posts if you have a group of articles you want to link together, like recipes or book reviews.

Notes TypeList or "Embed Your Own HTML" Module?

TypeLists are great if you think you'll be using the content on more than one blog or if you want to have several items all together in one list under one heading. You can create and manage TypeLists via the Library link at the top of any page.

The "Embed your own HTML" module is associated with an individual blog's design, via the Content page. You can add any code you'd like and come back to the Content page to add/edit/remove that code later. The module does not show a header on the blog, just the output of the code you've entered.

We have more information about adding custom sidebar content in our Knowledge Base.

Basic or Advanced Templates?

In almost all cases, we recommend using Basic Templates. You have acess to features, like Custom CSS and the head module, that will allow most users to customize their design to their heart's content without getting into template code.

There are times when Advanced Templates are the better option - if you want to create a non-traditional layout, have special formatting you need to use, etc. However, because Advanced Templates are coded by hand using HTML, CSS and Typepad tags, we strongly suggest seeing if Basic Templates will work before committing to Advanced Templates. You can always reach out to us to check!

Have you ever wondered which feature to use? Let us know in the comments and we can lend a hand!