Feature Updates: Comments, TrackBacks, sharing, URLs and statistics

Earlier today we rolled out two new features to TypePad, and made a few minor changes that we want you to know about. First the features...

Add "Save to del.icio.us" and "Digg This" links to your posts

We've added the ability for you to add "Save to del.icio.us" and "Digg This" links to the footers of your posts and pages. These links will let your readers easily share your posts and pages on the popular social content sharing services del.icio.us and Digg. While we did this, we updated the design of the page that lets you select the content that appears in post and page footers to make it easier to control the footer content that appears on your site. We're looking to add more social sharing services in the future, so let us know which services your readers are using.

Let your readers comment and leave TrackBacks on pages

Based on popular request, we've also added the ability for you to let your readers leave comments and TrackBacks on pages. This is a great feature for those of you who use pages to add content that doesn't quite fit in the time-based flow of your blog, but that you'd like to collect feedback on. You can turn comments and TrackBacks on or off by default for new pages you create, and control them per-page just as you can with posts.

And the changes...

Search engine-friendly URLs

Starting today, the URLs TypePad generates for your posts will use hyphens ( - ) instead of underscores ( _ ) to replace any whitespace or special characters in your post title. This change makes it more likely that a search engine will index the words in a post's URL.

Improved page view statistics

Finally, we made a number of improvements to the way that we track and report page view statistics, with the goal of improving our reporting accuracy. Learn more after the jump...

For the past few weeks we've been hard at work improving the way that we track and display page view statistics. A big thanks to all of you who let us know when you were seeing data that seemed off – your feedback led directly to all of these improvements.

Here's what we changed:

• We've fixed a bug where some page views from some repeat visitors weren't being recorded. This change means that you may see an increase in your daily page views starting today, but the count will be more accurate since TypePad will now capture all page views, even from repeat visitors to pages they've seen recently.

• The stats page now notes that stats may be delayed for up to 45 minutes instead of five. This isn't a change in how we track stats – rather, it more accurately tracks to how TypePad's statistics system records a page view and rolls up that data for display in the application.

• The "Today since midnight GMT" statistic now really does reflect the page views that have come in since midnight GMT. Previously there was a bug where your current day's page view counter didn't reset itself right at midnight GMT; that's been fixed.

• We've updated the chart so that it includes the current day's hits.

• The current day's tally is now also included in the lifetime page views. But note that the current day's tally is not included in the computation of the average daily page views. We wait for a full day to expire before including that number in the average calculation.

• You can now download a .csv file with lifetime page view data for any of your blogs and photo albums, not just your default blog.

There's still one last issue we know of that we didn't get a chance to fix before this release. If you download the .csv file with lifetime page view data it may not include data for the previous day. We're working hard on fixing this and hope to have it working soon.