Update from TypePad's CEO

Dear TypePad members,

This morning you may have experienced some downtime on TypePad. We know you rely on us to provide superior service and performance, and this morning we let you down. Downtime on your blog is obviously frustrating, both for you and for us, and we are very sorry. I'm writing to assure you that this is unacceptable to us and explain some of the background for the disruption.

In January I wrote that 2008 would be a year in which there would be more development on TypePad than ever before. You responded with loads of encouragement, requests, suggestions, critiques, and compliments. In the past few months you've seen a lot of activity here on TypePad, which I'll talk about more below.

To deliver on your feature requests, we've been making some significant changes under the hood. Over the past months, we've been in the process of moving all TypePad blogs to a next generation platform that will allow more personalized features for you and your readers, and more integration with other web services. We have tried to do this with as little disruption as possible, but clearly we haven't been perfect. We want you to know that we have our entire TypePad operations and engineering team focused and dedicated to minimizing these transition issues.

By the end of this summer we plan to have everyone switched to the new platform, which will allow for more improvements to the composition, design and publishing aspects of TypePad. It will also greatly improve how TypePad works with rich media -- photos, audio and video -- and will bring new community features to the service. We are building these features to help you make your blog better, and to help you drive more traffic to your sites. The new platform has already enabled us to bring new features to the product, including:

• Automatic pagination of your blog's entry archives and comments
• Launch of our new compose editor, with improved controls for formatting your posts
• The launch of the TypePad-powered Facebook application, Blog It, which makes it easy to blog from Facebook
• The launch of the TypePad AntiSpam service, which is helping to protect your blog from spam comments and TrackBacks
• Innovations in TypePad Mobile, including the Blackberry application and iPhone UI

Over the summer we will be emailing you, blogging on Everything TypePad and putting alerts into your account dashboard to let you know about the progress we're making to migrate your account and to introduce you to the new features we're building. I'd like to thank you for your input over these past months, and patience during this time as we make the final push to completing this transition.

If you run into any problems or have any support needs or questions, please don't hesitate to consult support.typepad.com or file a support ticket through the "Help" link at the top of the TypePad application.

And please do continue to email me with your comments, questions and concerns.

Best regards,

Chris

Christopher J. Alden
Chairman & CEO
Six Apart, Ltd.

Comments

[S.R.Springman]

Hi, great stuff! When might I expect to see more Web2.0 things like the new "Compose" text editor? I'm anxious to try it. It's almost July......
Thanks

[Dewita]

..having an automated saving feature will be sooo cool. Because right now, we don't have it..