Need Help With Your Blog?

Do you want to improve your blog but you're not sure where to start? Need some extra help launching a new blog? TypePad's expert Blog Services team are here for you! We evaluate your blog and provide tips on best posting practices, branding, custom domains and banners, and more. Then we take care of the recommended changes for you. Find out more and sign up to purchase one of our Blog Services at TypePad One.

Adding Email Alerts to Your Blog

Want to use your blog as a newsletter? I asked our own Andy Wibbles how, and here's the scoop.

• First connect your blog to your Feedburner account.
  
• Log in to Feedburner and click on the feed you want to add email alerts to. The Dashboard for that feed will display.
  
• Click on "Publicize" and then "Email Subscriptions".
  
• Select Feedburner and click "Activate". Feedburner displays a success screen with your subscription form HTML.
  
• Underneath that is a "Use as a widget in" menu. Select TypePad and click Go. Feedburner then sends you into TypePad.
  
• Select the blog that you want to add the subscription form to and click Add Widget. TypePad adds the subscription form to your blog.
  
• Click "View Weblog" to see it or click Change Content Ordering to change where the form appears in your sidebar.
  
• Test it: Subscribe to your blog and then tomorrow you should get an alert if you write a new post.
  
• Other options under Feedburner include: being able to configure the activation email for subscribers, the fonts and colors of the email alerts, adding a logo and what time of the day email alerts should be sent.

Setting Goals with Seth Godin

Longtime power TypePad blogger Seth Godin has this to say today about setting goals:

"It's not stupid to have a stated goal of starting several ventures that will fail, or asking three stupid questions a week, or posting a blog post that the world disagrees with. If you don't have goals like this, how exactly are you going to luck into being remarkable?"

What helps you make your blogging goals? Are you aiming to post more often, to a specific topic, or to reach a new audience?

Looking For A New Job?

If you’re looking for a new job, or will be soon, check out our tutorial on how to build a professional blog and resume online. Make it easy for potential employers to learn more about your knowledge and experience, and get an edge on the competition. The tutorial shows you how to put your resume online, along with some tips for setting up a fantastic professional blog.

Build your resume this weekend!

TypePad Bloggers on TV

Two of our amazing TypePad bloggers, Matt of mattbites.com and Meg of cuteoverload.com were on Martha Stewart's show recently talking about what else: blogging! Along with some other great bloggers - including the whole audience - Matt and Meg wowed Martha with their stories about how a "little four letter word sparked an internet revolution".  Check out some behind-the-scenes photos on Meg’s Vox blog, and watch Matt make cookies and talk about blogging with Martha (great job, Matt!):

Several other TypePad bloggers were featured in Martha’s Best of the Blogs list, including Senior Stylist at Martha Stewart Living Eddie Ross and these awesome design and lifestyle blogs:

• Oh Joy!
• bad banana blog
• Bloesem Kids and Bloesem
• little birds handmade
• Gastrokid
• Soule Mama
• WREN handmade
• Creative Thursday

Congratulations to our TypePad bloggers for getting a shout-out from Martha – high compliments, indeed!

Did you watch Martha's blogging show? Want to know more about how to get your own great-looking TypePad blog? Let us know in the comments.

Connecting With TypePad's Amazing Bloggers

So many of us blog to connect, so today we'd like to focus on a few ways we're meeting up and connecting in real life. 

Join Us In San Francisco
If you're attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco from April 22nd - 25th, we'd like to invite you to meet up with staffers and fellow bloggers from TypePad and Six Apart.

Look for Six Apart's booth (location #245) at the Expo, where we'll have some demonstrations of our latest products and services as well as some goodies to give away.  We're holding a drawing to give away 5 Vudu boxes so be sure to stop by our booth!  You can also drop in on Six Apart staffer David Recordon's panel on April 24th from 2:40-3:30pm to hear him speak about Open Platforms in Web 2.0.

On Wednesday, April 23rd, we're participating in the South Park Progressive Party event from 7-10pm where companies and sponsors in and around South Park are hosting parties and opening their offices.  At Six Apart HQ we're hosting a miniature golf party. Come join in the fun to compete for prizes while you eat, drink and network!

• Will you be attending Web 2.0?  Let us know in the comments.
  

Speaking of Meetups...
TypePad member Georgia Getz, author of i am bossy, is in the midst of an amazing road trip across the United States where she's meeting her readers in person.  She's on a mission to meet all her bloggy friends and has already stopped through Tallahassee, Los Angeles, Portland and everywhere in between.  Georgia's latest post is from Rawlins, Wyoming, with miles to go before her trip concludes.

We would have told you about her trip sooner, but we just got wind of it from a great article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.  Georgia, we're sorry we missed you in San Francisco - drive safely out there and let us know how you're doing!

Read more about Bossy's Excellent Road Trip. 

• Has your blog reading or writing inspired an upcoming trip, meetup or event? Let us know in the comments.

And Speaking of Amazing TypePad Bloggers...
If you haven't stopped by Martha Stewart's blog on TypePad, you should read her poignant post about the passing of her beloved Chow, Paw Paw. 

Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott described this post as the birth of Martha Stewart as a true blogger: 

"It was a real blog post, not something manufactured for a glossy magazine. It was a chronology of Paw Paw's last day. The captions, as written by Paw Paw, were brief and so not about perfection and good things, but about a good life."

Losing a pet is something so many of us can relate to, and sharing our personal triumphs and tragedies is just one of the many ways we all connect through bloggging.  Martha, our hearts are with you during this difficult time.  Visit Martha's truly up close & personal blog, and leave your condolences in the comments to her post.

A brief interview with Alex Ross

If you're a fan of modern classical music, then you probably already know all about Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker magazine, his TypePad blog, and his just-published book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.  If you're not (yet) a fan, Ross' writing is a great place to learn about the connection between West Side Story and Schoenberg's 12 tones, or the path from Jean Sibelius to John Coltrane.

After Ross recently published a piece in The New Yorker about how blogging (and the Internet more broadly) is helping classical music, we decided to catch up with him and ask him a couple questions about his own blog writing and reading...

Q: Why do you blog?

I often ask this myself. I do have a very nice day job, after all, at the New Yorker. But I find it irresistible. The blog allows me to indulge in a kind of writing that I couldn't pull off anywhere else — a little bit sly, a little bit whimsical, a little bit aphoristic, a little bit poetic, some days nothing more than a photo, other days a fragment of an essay. It's a very "now" medium, but it also somehow harks back to the nineteenth century when authors would publish bits and pieces of treatises and diaries in the columns of newspapers. After a while, with the fascinating suggestions coming in from readers, the blog more or less writes itself!

Q: What music blogs are you reading lately?

I'm reluctant to pick out a few music blogs for fearing of slighting others, but here goes. In my recent New Yorker piece I singled out Jeremy Denk's blog Think Denk, a compulsively readable mix of close musical analysis and personal confession. There's never been anything like it. I also regularly check in on Sid Chen's The Standing Room, which casts a very smart and sly eye on the classical world. Sid recently "outed" himself after several years of anonymous blogging: he's the artistic administrator of the Kronos Quartet.

Soho the Dog is the deliriously inventive blog of the composer and critic Matthew Guerrieri. As often in the classical blogosphere, the deeply serious mixes with the deeply zany. We're all waiting the next installment of Matthew's ongoing graphic novel, "Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments." And, for fear of devastatingly sardonic reprisals, I must cite the queen of opera bloggers, La Cieca, who knows which sopranos are about to have "procedures" and which tenors are about to go bananas — and is a brilliant opera critic on the side.

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Many thanks to Alex, and here's to continued success with his column, his book and, of course, his blog!

TypePad hearts Boston!

What do the TV program This Old House, David Sedaris, the Boston Red Sox, and the historic preservation of Boston have in common? They are just some of the topics covered by passionate and prolific TypePad bloggers in the Boston area.

Interior designer Abbey Koplovitz presents design tips for the rest of us in her blog, On Interior Design, sharing beautiful photos that illustrate her design challenges and accomplishments. One of her recent renovation projects will be featured this fall in the TV program This Old House, whose editors and producers keep three different TypePad blogs for the show and magazine:  Old House My House,  The Shelter Life, and The Hardware Aisle.

Aisle Be Seeing You is a blogospheric guide to the Boston Celebrity Series, a music, dance and art performance series presenting a wide range of performers who will visit Boston this season, including Itzhak Perlman, The Paul Taylor Dance Troupe, and David Sedaris. The blog gives great links to resources about each performer.

And how ‘bout those Red Sox? Three popular TypePad blogs discuss, dissect, analyze, and laugh at the adventures of the Sox, covering everything  from the shape of Josh Beckett’s facial hair in the humorous blog Cursed To First, to Derek Hixon’s analysis of the team’s performance in the Sawx Blog, to commentary on the relative merits of the Sox vs. the Yankees on the active Yanks Fan Sox Fan blog. All three of these blogs are entertaining and engaging, as you can see by the many comments of their readers.   

For a walk down memory lane, visit the City Record and Boston News-Letter, where you will find rich information about the history of Boston and its environs. Historian Charles Swift shares old Boston maps, recommends good summer reads, and answers readers’ questions about all things Boston history.

Recently featured...

Now that we're back up from our short (and successful) maintenance window, this weekend might be the perfect time to catch up on some of the latest blogs that we've highlighted at featured.typepad.com.  Here are three blogs we've featured lately...

The Lulu Blooker Blog
Bloggers are getting book deals right and left. Lulu, a prominent figure in the self-publishing industry has sponsored a new award -- The Lulu Blooker Prize. And the Lulu Blooker Blog discusses all things about this annual contest for books that have sprout from blogs.

Zane Blog
Zane Safrit is in the business of creating customer evangelists. He is the CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, a company dedicated to offering simple and affordable ways to conference. Zane's blog is an outlet where he shares his wisdom on the Web 2.0 world, as well as cool stuff that crosses his browser.

Root Magazine
Do you know the difference between Samba and Salsa? Professional photographer and dance enthusiast Marcy Mendelson is building a global community for lovers of dance, culture, and music. Root Magazine educates its readers on dance while pointing to all kinds of world beats from Bhangra to Tango.

And even though it wasn't on "Featured" this week, we also want to point out a great collaborative blog that our friends at Palm put together to cover the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.  The CES 2007 Micro Blog invited anyone with a Treo to register with Palm as a guest author on the Micro Blog.  Contributors then used TypePad Mobile for the Palm to post photos and updates from the show.  It's a great (and entertaning) record of conference life in Vegas.

Are you interested in seeing your blog in lights (where "lights" means "14px bold Arial")?  We're always on the lookout for great sites, as well as feedback on why you love doing what you do with your blog. So let us know!

New Webloggers, New Experiences

While looking through our referrers, I found a great post about TypePad and community.

Carried Away writes about The "Recently Updated Weblogs" Effect:

"William, who publishes "the life - or NOT!", checked his referrers list and found a hit coming off of my site, and in turn checked out my site and then TrackBacked a post to me here. I know that's the whole point of the TrackBack feature, that  readers are allowed more insight into a particular topic, but there is also an element of "connecting" going on. At least right now when blogging is still realtively new to a lot of us."

Placing the "Recently Updated List" on your own weblog is certainly a great way to help foster this community. While it may not be an option for those who like to selectively link to weblogs, it's a way to get discovered through reciprocal links. Of course, you have to be comfortable with the idea that you may end up having a link to a weblog that expresses an opinion that you may not agree with. It's this sort of gamble that is what makes weblogging appealing -- different opinions to read, consider and even sometimes ignore.

We'll be soon adding some new and very exciting community features to be found on the blogs.com domain. Look for these features in late September!