Everything Typepad

Show off your traffic and most popular content with Feedjit widgets

The folks at Feedjit have put together four great widgets designed to show of your blog's traffic and guide readers to your most popular content, live! Feedjit's widgets are customizable to your blog's look and feel and don't require any registration.

Feedjit's Live Traffic Feed
Feedjit's Live Traffic Feed provides you and your readers with a real-time view of visitors to your blog. See where in the World your visitors are, which websites they arrive from, what pages they are viewing and which links they click to leave your site. Get it now...

Feedjit's Live Traffic Map
Feedjit's Live Traffic Map provides you and your readers with a real-time map showing where in the world your readers are. The map shows the 100 most recent visitors to your blog. Moving your mouse over each point on the map shows the city and country of each visitor. Get it now...

Feedjit's Collaborative Filter
Feedjit's Collaborative Filter suggests interesting pages on your blog to your readers. It uses a sophisticated algorithm to predict what pages a visitor may enjoy based on the behavior of previous visitors to your blog who had similar tastes. Prediction is done in real-time and we begin to analyze traffic patterns on your blog from the moment you install the widget. Get it now...

Feedjit's Live Popular Pages
Feedjit's Live Popular Pages widget guides your visitors to your most popular content. The most popular pages are calculated using your recent traffic, so the list is continually updated and is always current. Search engine visitors often hit one page on your blog and then leave. Live Popular Pages will draw them into your site and may turn them into regular visitors. Get it now...

Maintenance Friday, November 30, at 10 pm PST

Friday, November 30, from 10 pm PST to midnight (that's 05:00 to 07:00 UTC on December 1) we'll be performing routine maintenance on TypePad.

During this time, access to the TypePad application, TypePad blogs and the TypeKey authentication service may be impacted.

As always, we'll be keeping status.sixapart.com up to date with the latest information, so bookmark that site if you're interested in following along. Thanks for your patience as we continue to invest in making TypePad bigger, faster and stronger!

Who's in the News?

From nominations for the 2007 Weblog awards like Amalah, who won for the Best Parenting Blog, to coverage in publications around the world, it’s been another great week for TypePad customers!

Canadian publication, The Godrich Signal Star, profiled TypePad blog Smiling Eyes. The blog enables photographers to provide their services free of charge to those battling cancer. Smiling Eyes began in November of 2006, when founder Christine Kufske provided a neighbor with a complimentary photo session prior to her chemotherapy.

The NY Sun’s business column included Café Hayek and wrote that “Don Boudreaux waxes philosophical about curious inconsistencies in the ways American liberals and conservatives utilize the concept of "undesigned order" in their respective arguments.”

New York Magazine named TypePad blog TwitterLit the “Time-Waster of the Day” The blog’s author, Debra Hamel. posts the first line of a book in her blog, without the author's name or book title, leaving readers to test their literary ‘”detective skills”. (A link to Amazon.com lists the answers.)

Love is in the air for blogger Emily Anderson of EcoChic Weddings, who was recently interviewed on The Today Show. Emily and her husband were featured in a segment about how to make love last. Very appropriate for a writer who penned EcoChic Weddings, a book about how to have a sustainable wedding.

Todd Barrett Lieman’s book, “GoTo Guides for Guys ABCs for Expectant Dads" was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle. Todd also blogs about his experiences as a father to 2-year-old Kolby on Life and Times of a New Dad.

Thanks for all of those who wrote in with suggestions and tips about their blogs in the news. We’ll be keeping an eye out for other customers in the news for the next post!

New themes with w-i-d-e sidebars

Have you ever wanted to make your blog's sidebars wide enough to contain large ads and oversize widgets? These themes were made with you in mind! We've created versions of the Asterisk themes we added earlier this month with sidebars large enough to hold items up to 300px wide – perfect for the wider ad units from services like Google Ad Sense. Want to use a wide sidebar, but keep your current theme? If your account level is Pro or higher you can set the width of your sidebars using custom CSS.

You can apply the Asterisk Wide themes to your blog by visiting the Design tab under your blog. Enjoy!

A new look for Everything TypePad

Two of our resident design gurus -- Mena Trott and Walt Dickinson -- have been hard at work on a new look for Everything TypePad that we think you'll really like. We've updated the layout, colour scheme and fonts for a more pleasant reading experience. (If you're not seeing the new design or if things look a little odd, hit refresh in your browser.)

The new design includes the latest from Featured TypePad Blogs to help inspire you. (You can submit your own site here if you're ready to inspire others.)

Have feedback for us? Seeing any bugs that need fixing? Let us know in the comments.

Advanced Customizations with CSS

While we offer a variety of themes and layouts, subscribers at the Pro, Premium or Business Class level can also use CSS to change the look and feel of their weblog without Advanced templates. TypePad designs are created with CSS flexibility in mind, so you can make big changes with just a few code edits.

The Custom CSS option can be used to make minor changes, such as styling a blockquote or highlighting Technorati tags.

You can use CSS to have control over the column widths for your weblog. Whether you using a pre-defined or a Custom theme, we have detailed instructions on changing your column widths with CSS as well as information on adding background images to your weblog or even to each specific column.

You can also use Custom CSS to add a customized banner to a pre-defined theme or remove the default banner padding that is automatically included.

If you're using an Advanced Template set, you can even use CSS to set up a mobile or print-friendly version of your weblog following the instructions found here.

We are always working to add new tips and tricks to our Knowledge Base, so be sure to watch that article for different things that you can do to jazz up your weblog.

- Zalary and the Support Team

Share your new blog posts with your friends on Facebook

As Facebook announced yesterday, we are excited to offer Facebook Beacon functionality on TypePad. Facebook Beacon is a new feature on Facebook makes it simple to insert actions into your Facebook Mini-Feed and News Feed from sites outside of Facebook, and then in turn share them with your friends on Facebook. Offering Facebook Beacon on TypePad means that you can now choose to share your new blog posts with your friends on Facebook.

This is an opt-in feature -- you'll be able to control whether or not you want to send your posts to Facebook, and of course we'll only do this when you're creating posts on the blogs you publicize. We see this as a great way to help you let your friends on Facebook know that you've updated your blog.  You can read the TypePad Knowledge Base article for more information about how to enable Facebook Beacon for your blog.

TypePad Tour of Chicago

This month, we’re touring TypePad in Chicago, where professors at the University of Chicago Law School, a green building advocate, some music lovers, and a mortgage planning specialist are just some of the Windy City’s bloggers.

Lofty legal issues are discussed and debated by the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School on their TypePad blog. Plenty of lively discussion, thinking, and research take place on a wide variety of legal topics, from whether the current Supreme Court session will usher in a paradigm shift, to whether liberals should start being originalists.

Chicago is a city known for its architecture, and green buildings are the subjects of GreenBean, a TypePad blog written by Erik Olsen, Green Projects Administrator for the Chicago Department of Construction and Permits and manager of the Green Permit Program. Olsen posts drawings and photos of environmentally-friendly projects that are unbuilt, in-progress, or complete as a resource for the Chicago design and development community. 

Speaking of  building projects, don’t miss Dan Green's blog, The Mortgage Reports. Green is a Certified Mortgage Planning Specialist, and uses his blog to discuss the state of the economy and how it affects the mortgage and real estate market. Green dispenses advice to real estate buyers, is interviewed by other experts in the field and then posts the podcasts for all to hear.

Chicago has plenty of music, and plenty of people who write about it, starting with music journalist Mark Geelhoed. His TypePad blog, Deceptively Simple, is full of news, reviews and commentary about happenings in the Chicago classical music scene. Geelhoed gives helpful recommendations in his sidebar, like Compact Discs Worth Your Dollars, and introduces Musicians With Blogs in another sidebar. This is a must-read for anyone interested in local classical music.

Brian Dickie shares his enthusiasm for his role with the Chicago Opera in Brian Dickie, Life as General Director of Chicago Opera Theater. This is a blog that brims with Brian’s contagious love for all things opera. It contains beautiful photos and reports of his travels around the world scouting singers and judging opera competitions, and of local opera news and events. It’s a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a world most of us never see.

Now let’s go subterranean to visit Radio Free Chicago, a TypePad blog that is "Chicago's Underground Music and Media Resource". Ten contributors post live reviews, previews, news, interviews, podcasts, downloads and more on this comprehensive compendium, making this a happening site for all music fans.

We barely scratched the surface of TypePad users in Chicago, so we'll return again for another tour.

Who's in the News?

TypePad blogs stand out in the blogosphere – and now the national media is taking note! Here’s what several newspapers had to say:

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette did a story on women entering the blogosphere. Among the blogs included was Been There, a ‘mommy blog’ started in November 2004 with “Our first entry in a long discussion.”

Nationally syndicated Fox TV show, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, interviewed TypePad blogger, Katherine Stone, on Postpartum Depression. Katherine blogs about this (and on topics such as supplements for depression) at her Postpartum Progress blog.

Future journalists at Rome’s John Cabot University (including those students who blog at the school’s The Mathew blog) were included in a Times Online story on the Italian government’s proposal of a “broad law that would effectively require all bloggers, and even users of social networks, to register with the state.”

Sometimes, our customers are actually the media writing the article. Pam Peirce is a garden columnist at The San Francisco Chronicle. Last week, she covered how to control clover growth and use barn owls for rodent control. You can also read her blog at Golden Gate Garden.

Thanks to all of you who sent us tips on news coverage of your favorite TypePad blog. Keep sending them in and watch for yours to appear here!

Asterisk these themes

Last week we added two new themes to TypePad. They're designed to look great on their own, and be customized easily using TypePad's CSS feature. Asterisk White is a fresh, clean white theme, and Asterisk Black has a dark sophisticated look.

You can apply these themes to your blog by visiting the Design tab under your blog. Enjoy!