Everything Typepad

It’s the "little-big" things…

Every time we add new features to TypePad we eagerly await your response, and we are often pleasantly surprised by what you get enthusiastic about. With the latest release your greatest response was to a feature that was simple for us but has a big impact for you: increased storage and bandwidth.

As we are hitting peak vacation season, we wanted to make sure you were aware that all TypePad customers now have almost double their storage and bandwidth at no additional cost.  So, go ahead and upload those vacation photos and share them with your friends and family – you’ve got plenty of room.

Tip: To see your current bandwidth and storage limits, along with current bandwidth and storage totals, visit the Account Overview page on your Control Panel.

Manage Comments directly from Your Inbox

Whether you just started your weblog or have been blogging for years, everyone loves the rush of getting feedback from friends, family and “fans” at large.  To make this process even more immediate, we enhanced the comment notification email so that you can now edit, approve, or delete a newly submitted comment directly from your Inbox.

To subscribe to comment notification emails, visit your weblog’s Configure tab and...

Many of you also requested a way to subscribe to either HTML or plain text emails. So for those of you that don't like HTML emails (because you use a text based email client, or because you simply don’t like HTML email), you can now choose. Either way, both plain text and HTML comment notification emails contain all the links you need to make it easier to manage your comments directly from your email.

To change your email preferences, visit the Account Overview page located under the Control Panel and select "Plain Text" or “HTML” from the email preferences section in the right hand column of the screen.

Managing TypePad Communities

TypePad now makes it possible for your commenters to sign in with the TypeKey service when commenting on your weblog. TypeKey authentication can be a tool to fight comment spam, but while it's one of the surest ways to keep comment spam off of your weblog, we see TypeKey as a tool that can help you build the community around your blog.

Weblogs aren't simply a collection of posts and comments, they're places where people with similar interests gather and where communities form. So, TypeKey gives you a more reliable way to understand who is visiting your blog, while still respecting their privacy.

To turn on Comment Moderation for your blog, visit the Configure > Preferences tab and set comment authentication to either “optional”, “required”, or “off”.

To manage moderation preferences associated with a specific TypeKey commenter, go to the List Comment screen and select “hold for approval” or “automatically publish” from the options associated with that user.

To keep your community happy and healthy, you'll want to encourage good commenting behavior. Most of the time that happens on its own, but sometimes, intervention can be required. If members of the community aren't being constructive, TypePad gives you a way to block them from commenting on your weblog in the future.

Whether you use TypeKey to fight comment spam, or as a way to make community management easier, the combination of TypeKey and TypePad helps everyone to build your community, and easily manage the conversation around your blog.

Sneaking a feature in there...

The challenge with putting together a major update to TypePad like we did at the beginning of this month is that little features might not get noticed. And sometimes it's these "little" things that are the coolest features, like the new IM Status content module.

In case this new feature slipped by you, we wanted to let you know that all TypePad subscribers can now use the instant message identities in your TypePad profile to display your IM status on your weblog.

Now your readers can know when you're online or off, and can quickly shoot you an instant message just by clicking your IM screen name from your weblog. And stay tuned to Everything TypePad over the next couple of weeks as we highlight additional features that we've snuck in there and that you may have overlooked.

Thanks for Your Patience

It would be an understatement to say that we here at Six Apart have had a busy week following last weekend’s push of all the new features in TypePad. While we were very excited about how feature-packed this new release is, we were less-than-pleased with the amount of service degradation that resulted because of some code hiccups.

You can rest assured knowing that the staff here have been working around the clock monitoring TypePad’s performance and resolving performance issues. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced including the various display bugs that cropped up. This includes the paragraph spacing, footer and TypeList item display quirks that have now been resolved.

Lastly, we realize that we could have done a much better job giving you an advanced warning about the sort of behavior that was to be expected with the release (including the rebuilding of your weblog). We’ve learned from this experience and will be giving you more than ample notice about upcoming releases.

Remember, we also have our status site to help you keep track of site maintenance.

Your suggestions and effort in helping us troubleshoot the issues has been greatly appreciated and we hope that you enjoy the new features — which are rather awesome. Keep an eye out for posts in the future that will tell you how to best utilize the new features.

New Design Tools, More Storage, More Bandwidth

Over the past few weeks we have posted about the upcoming enhancements to the Design and Community Management features on TypePad.  We are very excited to release these new enhancements today.  What you haven't yet heard about are the many new enhancements and features we have sprinkled throughout the service. Most of these features are a direct result of your input and requests, and some are features we just thought you’d think are fun. (Doubling storage and bandwidth are two examples). We think your weblogging experience is going to greatly benefit from these enhancements, so enjoy!  Here's the list:

New Features

* Increased bandwidth limits and storage limits for everyone! All users at all service levels now have their storage and bandwidth limits effectively doubled. That’s right - doubled! So go ahead upload those photos. There’s  plenty of room. * New Instant Message status side bar – With the simple click of a button you can show your IM status in your sidebar content. Now your AOL buddies and Yahoo friends can see what you are up to.