Everything Typepad

Including Videos in Posts: Now even easier!

Are you ready to add videos to your blog? TypePad and video hosting sites, like YouTube and VideoEgg, make it easy to share videos with your visitors.

We've mentioned VideoEgg previously, but if you haven't visited their site lately, you might be surprised at the changes to their service. It is even easier to upload and manage your personal videos and add them to your post.

Other online services, like YouTube, provide you with embed code you can insert into your posts using the plain text editor.

If you'd like to share a video from Google Video, click on the Blog button to the right of video to publish it directly to your TypePad blog.

Additional information on inserting video in posts is available in the Knowledge Base.

New Widgets from Amazon Associates

We've been adding a lot of new Widgets to the TypePad Widget Gallery recently, but we couldn't be more excited about our newest Widgets from Amazon.com Associates. They have just unveiled typepadwidgets.amazon.com, which features three Widgets built specifically for TypePad users.

• The Express Yourself Widget lets you recommend and comment on products from Amazon.com
• The Search Widget lets your readers find and explore interesting products from Amazon.com without them leaving your site
• The Quick Linker Widget lets you quickly link to relevant Amazon.com products, by including a custom HTML tag as you write your blog posts.

The Widgets are highly customizable -- not only can you pick the products to display or the categories to search, but you can also customize the colors and look and feel of each Widget to fit well with your TypePad blog.  And if you're a member of the Amazon Associates program, you can enter your Associates ID when you're customizing the Widget to make money when readers purchase items you link to.

As with all of our Widgets, installing takes just a few clicks.  To get started, visit the TypePad Widget Gallery or head straight to typepadwidgets.amazon.com to explore, customize and install an Amazon Widget for your blog.

Feeds: Not Just for Newsreaders Anymore

You may know that web feeds are a great way to keep up to date with new content on your favorite blogs. But did you know that they can do much more than that? Feeds can be used in a variety of ways such as gathering content from other sources and publishing it in one location, adding new functionality to your weblog and notifying subscribers of new updates via email.

For example, if you would like to display links to recent posts from other weblogs or other sources on your weblog, try using the Feeds module in Weblogs > Design > Select Content. This is a great way merge all of your weblogs in one and link to recent updates in services such as Flickr or Last.fm. The Feeds module does all the work for you. You can configure it to display 5 or 10 items at a time and it checks for updates on a regular basis to keep your content up to date. You can find more on this feature in our Knowledge Base.

If bringing all of your content together isn't enough, you can always try adding new functionality to your weblog and feed. FeedBurner's FeedFlares are a great way to enhance your weblog and feed and promote them at the same time. By enabling this feature from the Optimize tab in FeedBurner, you can select from a range of items such as links to Technorati, Digg and del.icio.us for each post. You can even add "Email This" links to your weblog without having to touch a single snippet of HTML. With this feature, there is something for everyone and if you can't find what you need, check out the FeedFlare Catalog and 101 FeedFlares for a Better Tomorrow. You can find more on using FeedBurner with TypePad in our Knowledge Base.

One of our favorite ways to use a feed is to receive new updates from a weblog via email. With the FeedBlitz widget, you can set this up for your weblog in just a few clicks. This is a great way to keep your viewers in the loop with new content added to your weblog. You can find some tips on setting up this widget in our Knowledge Base.

We hope these tips have given you some ideas you can use to enhance your weblog and don't forget, your feed can do more than you think it can.

The Knowledge Base: Not Just for New Users

While the TypePad Knowledge Base may seem to be geared more towards new users, it's also a great resource for our more experienced users, such as those using Advanced Template sets.

If you’re looking for more advanced tricks, you can place a random entry in your sidebar - even entries just from specific categories or time periods.  This is a good way to highlight specific information or posts that you’d like to make sure are seen by your readers.

For those of you who have invited additional guest authors to post on your weblog, you can learn how to create a page that lists each author’s posts, making it easy for your readers to find all posts by an author.

There’s even articles on using banners with Advanced Template sets or Custom CSS, including how to center a banner in a fluid theme or add a banner to one of our many pre-defined themes which allows you more flexibility for your weblog’s design.

You can find a complete listing of all of these - as well as other ideas for both Advanced Template sets and Basic Templates - here.

If you'd like to know when we make changes to the Knowledge Base, which is a good way to learn about new features and ideas, we recommend subscribing to our Knowledge Base feed.

We’ve made it easier to manage posts, comments, TrackBacks, and TypeLists

This afternoon we launched some feature improvements that will make it easier for you to manage your posts, comments, and TrackBacks, as well as improving the way you add and manage items in your Book and Music TypeLists.

Easier filtering of posts, comments, and TrackBacks.

If you spend a lot of time managing your posts, comments, and TrackBacks, you’re probably familiar with the Filters feature, which helps you narrow lists to find the exact items you’re looking for.  In this release, we’ve made Filters even easier to use.  They now work in the same way on all three management pages (posts, comments, and TrackBacks), and display the current filter settings at all times to help you remember what you’ve selected. 

Add content via TypeList search. Better TypeList management.

We’ve also added a search feature for Book and Music TypeLists to allow you to search by keyword, then select entries from the search results.  Now, if you don’t remember an exact title of an item you don’t have go to an outside site to look it up.  So, if you want to add “Black Swan Green” to your book list, but can’t remember the author’s name, you can simply search on the title and select the appropriate result to have the title, author, and thumbnail populated automatically.  Additionally, we’ve streamlined the TypeList management page to allow you to bulk-edit lists and see up to 20 items at once. We’ve also changed the interface for ratings from a dropdown list to a one-click star system.

We hope you enjoy these improvements and, as always, we welcome your feedback.