Everything Typepad

Bursting at the Seams!

This coming weekend we will be conducting the final stages of a much needed cage move in our data center, as we have completely outgrown our space. We are not moving our machines far, but we are moving them. Thus, while the move is taking place (on January 22, 2005 at 11:00pm PST) the TypePad application may be unavailable, and access to published weblog content will be intermittent. We have scheduled this service outage during a time in which traffic is at its lowest to minimize the impact to our users and their readers, but we would still like to apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update: the move is complete. It took a little longer than we expected, but the system was brought back up at around 2:30am and is now fully located in the new cage. Thanks for your patience!

Mixed Media Templates Get an Upgrade!

It has been busy at Six Apart, and while we had to deal with a little hiccup this past week, we wouldn't want the week to go by without some good news to report as well. Last night we released some major enhancements to Dave Shea's mixed media layouts making them less fragile, and substantially more compatible with all of the most popular web browsers available.

If you have never seen these special weblog layouts, and especially if you moblog or publish a lot of photos then you most certainly should check them out, as our mixed media layouts are ideal for displaying images and other multimedia content. If you need assistance updating your weblog with the new layouts, our help system has a great article to help you.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot... In our never-ending War on Comment Spam we rolled out a relatively minor change to our service that we expect to have a significant impact on the degree of comment spam our users are subjected to. Working with a number of thought leaders in the weblogging community, we are the first hosted weblogging solution to deploy the rel="nofollow" attribute in all of our comments and trackbacks. But perhaps more importantly, we have deployed this feature to the largest number of webloggers to date. To learn more about how a little change to your HTML could have a dramatic impact on comment spam, check out our post on Six Log.

Temporary Service Degradation - January 13, 2005

This morning between the hours of 12:00 am and 8:30 am Pacific time on January 13, 2005, the TypePad application suffered from a temporary service impairment. The problem occurred during a scheduled maintenance window while performing a system upgrade. During this time access to the TypePad application was severely impaired due to load issues associated with our database. While the ability for people to post comments to TypePad weblogs was hindered, published weblogs were not affected in any other way. The problem has since been recovered from, and steps are being taken to assure that the problem does not happen again.

The TypePad team, and all of us here at Six Apart would like to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone.