New themes and a few new features

Last night we launched some new features on TypePad that we're excited about, and want to make sure you know about them. 

First, we introduced eight new themes; four color variations each on "Hills" and "Curves."  "Hills" is one of the most popular design sets from Vox, so we went ahead and "borrowed" it for TypePad users.  (And we'll be doing more theme "borrowing" over the next couple of months, so stay tuned.)  Curves is a new theme that's exclusive for TypePad users, and we think it has a nice professional look to it.

Second, if you're using one of TypePad's built-in templates, you'll notice that your entry titles are now linked to the permalink of the post.  This makes it easier for readers to navigate to your individual entries.  (Those hyperlinks will start to appear as your blog is republished, which can happen when someone comments, when you create a new post, or if you choose to republish from the Design tab.) There's some minor tweaks to the CSS for blogs to make the change seamless from a design perspective, too.

If things look a little bit off on your blog, just do a hard refresh in your browser (hold down the Shift key when you click reload) you should get the updated stylesheet and all will be right with the world.

Third, now you can add page headers to your date-based and category archives.  If you get readers who come in from Google and wonder where they heck they are, now they'll know where they are -- your archive page will have a message saying that the page has "26 entries from January 2007," for example. You can see this in action here on Everything TypePad, just click on over to our Features category page to check it out.

Finally, we cleaned up TypePad's Weblogs Design tab and our content selection screen. Now it's super easy to figure out just how to tweak your blog's look and feel.  And to top it off, there are dozens and dozens of small bugs that we've fixed since you've let us know about them.  (Thank you!)

Let us know what you think -- more features are on the way and the TypePad team's  working hard to keep improving the service.

Comments

[ALEXANDER SIMPSON]

Please please please add a feature at the top and bottom of any page where not all of the posts are shown, giving you the option to go to the next or previous set of posts. For example, if I have my blog set to show 50 posts, but have 250 posts, if you scroll down in my blog and get to #50, you should have something indicating that there are more, and a button to click to go to 51-100, etc.

[Michael Sippey]

Alexander -- thanks for your note; that's a feature that's definitely on our list!

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

Turning post titles into permalinks is fine, but does the style have to be the same as regular permalinks? Now, my nice black titles are blue and underlined.

Using a separate style for links is to make them visible in text, which is not a problem for post titles. Can this be reverted?

[Michael Sippey]

Hi, FS... As part of the update we also revised all of the published blog CSS, so that the styles of the entry titles shouldn't appear as links. It could be that the CSS for your blog is stuck in your browser's cache; if you hold down the shift key while clicking reload in your browser it should load the new CSS.

If you're still seeing the issue, be sure to file a help ticket and our support folks will help you out.

[Ricky Cadden]

Thanks for the updates, and keep up the great work. I've tried several other blogging services and this is definitely the easiest and most user-friendly of the bunch.

I agree with Alexander, that's something I would love to see.

I would also like to see some easy way for me to reply to comments on my own posts. As it is right now, I have to pull up my page (which messes with my page views count) and navigate to that post and post as if I was a reader. It'd be nice, in the comments viewer screen, if there was a "respond to comment" button that would let me do that quickly.

[Seshu]

Very cool. I lik the headline/titles as Permalinks a lot. Can we assume that will make our blogs more SEO-friendly?

Seshu

[John T. Unger]

Ricky, you might want to check out this tutorial for creating a comments page with "reply-to" links… It might be pretty close to what you're looking for:

http://www.typepadhacks.org/2006/11/how_to_create_a.html

You can view an example of the page here:

http://www.typepadhacks.org/comment_archive.html

Hope that helps!

[Graham]

Niiiice! Thanks a lot! Keep 'em coming. :-)

[Jason Jacobsohn]

Great updates. For inserting pictures in a post, can you add a feature that allows you to insert the picture url as well? That way, I don't have to always upload the picture. Thanks.

[laanba]

Thank you, thank you for adding the themes and I'm so glad there are more to come.

[Mary]

I like to put pictures on my blog, but sometimes I have A LOT and it takes forever to upload each picture one by one. Same goes for the photo album...I gave up on that. A Java program would be awesome so that you can open any folder and select only the pictures you want from that folder (instead of making a seperate folder and then having to make that folder into a zip drive). THANK YOU!!!

[Alvaro]

I use typepad 3 years ago.

I think that Curves design is very good looking and that is the way to. You should add more of this designs soon. We have seen how you were creating so much designs for Vox for users that don´t pay for the tool and that makes me feel dissapoint. Consider how much designs, css, etc have evolved since you launched typepad!

Even i can imagine it is difficult to crop premade designs in such a big platform as typepad, I would appreciate more typepad specific themes to come in the near future.

Thanks

[Account Deleted]

Have you created any new features around the concept of better organizing Typepad blogs. I have an advocacy blog that is used as a reference for many people. I've had the blog for over two years, I have nearly 200 posts, and I feel like it's fairly hard for people to wade through all of that to find what their looking for, even with the categories. Now that many Typepad blogs are getting older and larger, with wider readership, are you looking into ways to make navigation through these blogs easier and cleaner?

[Michael Sippey]

So much to respond to! Let's see if I can answer some of the questions... How about in reverse chron order?

Katherine: we are always looking for better ways to present navigation on blogs and make it easier for readers to find great content. If you haven't yet, you may want to try a "Category Cloud" which presents your category links in a "cloud" formation, with more popular categories showing up in a larger font size. You might also want to look at some of our "search" Widgets, and see if they might work for your readers. http://sixapart.com/typepad/widgets/search/

Alvaro: re. more designs, we're working on more and better themes and designs, and ones that are specifically designed for TypePad.

Mary: if you're looking for a better way to upload photos from your computer to TypePad, you might want to look at our Windows XP photo uploader, which integrates directly into Windows. http://support.typepad.com/cgi-bin/typepad.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=26 It works for uploading photos to photo albums. And we'll be looking at better ways to enable photo uploading to TypePad blogs..

Seshu: we think that hyperlinking entry titles will help with search engine optimization, but that's not why we made that change. Simply, we wanted to make it easier for your readers to find the permalink home for your entries.

Keep the cards and letters coming...

[serge the concierge]

Great Update

I found out about it yesterday while I was playing with a couple of new blog projects.

A request:
-Could you add an automatic 'save draft' function.
Sometimes there are technical issues while posting and you lose the whole post which is annoying

A few questions:
-Can you add different Typelists (say Ads) in the Main Page and the 'Categories' or 'Archives Pages'.
-Can you create a different 'About Page' for each site if you have different blogs in the same (Pro)account.
-Do the new designs and features allow you to include 'Google' or 'Yahoo' or other Ads in between posts with a Pro Account or is it still only possible with the 'Advanced Templates'.
-Can you now use 'Google Analytics'without using advanced templates.

Kudos for the great work

Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com

[M. S. Smith]

I, too, am happy to see the new designs, and I look forward to TypePad adding more. But I'm wondering -- can these designs be edited? Does one need a pro account to edit them? Or are they not editable? I'm curious because, while I like many of the new designs, I'd prefer to tweak some elements if I were to use any of them.

Thanks.

[Jennifer Chase]

It's good that you added new colors but i think you're missing some really key things. One is a template for photoblogs. There's really no good ones. The best one you have for this is the mixed media "artistic" template but that has bugs that you haven't fixed for months. When I go back to any post past the last two the large photo on the right doesn't show up just thumbnails. You need to fix this template! And develop or adapt some kind of generic photoblog template that can show large photos on the main page. Thanks.

[Septuagent]

Is it just me ? When I "just click on over to our Features category page to check it out" I just get another view of the page I'm already on.

[Alvaro]

Thanks!

I totally agree with Serge on his recomendations. They are really good, especially adding a draft function that automatically saves posts and facilitate ads integration and separate them from the content in some "out-of-the-box" solution.

The bottom link to navigate through older posts is also another great idea.

[PinkRunningShoes]

Thanks for all the great updates. I have a couple of suggestions/ideas/requests regarding the photo albums.

1. It would be GREAT if I could clone more than one picture at a time. Because I bounce from computer to computer, I typically upload a bunch of photos to an album that is not public and then whenever I have a chance (sometimes at work, sometimes at home, sometimes on my laptop...) I go through and distribute them to the correct album and add descriptions and such. But sometimes I have a group of photos that I would like to move all to a certain photo album and it's frustrating to have to open each photo and then clone it to the correct album and then delete it from the "dummy" album (however that is far less frustrating than other methods, so I'll take what I can get). It would be nice if I could select a number of pictures (the same way you would select multiple pictures to delete them) and then clone or even move them to another album.

2. Some of my photo albums are chronological, like christmas 2005 or Spring 2006 and I have a large number of photo albums in general. It would be great if I could make a photo album "closed" or something so that it wouldn't show up as an option when I'm uploading photos, but that I could still have on my typelist and still "get to it" if I needed to. So essentially when you aren't going to be uploading any new photos to a certain album, but you still want to be able to view that album from the blog. I don't know if that's possible, but in my perfect world...

3. Be able to arrange photos in a customized manner or have subcategories in the photo albums. For example, if I wanted a photo album of my house but I wanted to arrange the photos by room (kitchen, kids room, back yard) that I could group those photos together for view and do so in a way other than naming it Kitchen 1, Kitchen 2 and specifying alphabetical order.

and one suggestion/question for typelists...when you add a new item to a typelist sometimes you don't want it to be at the top or the bottom of the list, sometimes it belongs between two other previously entered items. Is there a way (or can there BE a way) to select where in the list you want the new item to go? For example a type list of books I've read reads A Prayer for Owen Meany, To Kill a Mockingbird, Interview with a Vampire and I want to add a new book title between A Prayer for Owen Meany and To Kill a Mockingbird with out having to delete and re-enter any of the titles. Currently I believe the typelist displays in ascending or descending order of when the item was added to the typelist.

So that's my 2 cents (or more). But really, loving my typepad experience.

[Robin Reagler]

New themes are always welcome. Thanks! And please add more in the near future!