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February 2009

Posts from January 2009

Jan 31 - TypePad Basics Teleseminar

Here's a link to the recording in WebEx's playback format. Still working on getting it into a more friendly format.

Heads up: We're conducting our first live TypePad class! Join veteran blogger and general TypePad smarty-pants Andy Wibbels in a 1-hour session on how to get the most out of your TypePad blog. We'll walk through the essental basics to set the stage for a superstar blog. This class is completely free and is open to anyone, anywhere.

In this workshop you'll:

  • Create your first blog and start posting immediately
  • Learn how to post images, upload files and add videos to your blog
  • Change the style of your blog to match your personality or business brand
  • Integrate your blog with Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks to increase your blog's reach

TypePad Essentials

  • Saturday January 31st
  • One 1-hour session
  • Starts at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern / 6:30 pm London
  • You will need an existing TypePad account or a credit card to start a free trial account.
  • Bring a laptop if you want to follow along as we walk-through TypePad.

Two ways to attend:

Onsite at Six Apart aka 'the TypePad mothership'

548 4th Street [map]
San Francisco, CA
94107

Virtual teleseminar

Before the call starts:

  1. Click here to join the WebEx session.
  2. Call-in toll-free: 866-699-3239 or (toll number) 1-408-792-6300.

Can't make the session? No big deal. We're recording the audio and the screencast for ya and it will be posted right here on the Everything TypePad blog.


Setting Goals with Seth Godin

Seth-Godin_1413©JohnAbbott Longtime power TypePad blogger Seth Godin has this to say today about setting goals:

"It's not stupid to have a stated goal of starting several ventures that will fail, or asking three stupid questions a week, or posting a blog post that the world disagrees with. If you don't have goals like this, how exactly are you going to luck into being remarkable?"

What helps you make your blogging goals? Are you aiming to post more often, to a specific topic, or to reach a new audience?



Looking For A New Job?

If you’re looking for a new job, or will be soon, check out our tutorial on how to build a professional blog and resume online. Make it easy for potential employers to learn more about your knowledge and experience, and get an edge on the competition. The tutorial shows you how to put your resume online, along with some tips for setting up a fantastic professional blog.

Build your resume this weekend!


Features, Fixes, and More

The best thing about TypePad? We do most of the heavy lifting, and you don't have to lift a finger. We take your questions and feature requests that you submit with our support team, feedback from our Customer Advisory Board, and features on our roadmap, and improve the product about every two weeks.  All without you having to worry about software updates, compatibility issues, or anything else.

To kick off the new year, we focused a lot of energy on fixing issues that we researched (thanks to your feedback) and fixed over the holidays.  Here are just a few:

  • Control your “Autosave". We know you love having autosave, but some people found some inconsistent behavior and requested more control. We’ve added a "Remove" link so that you can dismiss the "do you want to recover the last post" message if you know for sure you've saved it already.
  • Now half a billion people can sign in and leave a comment on your blog using TypePad Connect.  Now it’s easier than ever for OpenID users to leave a comment on your blog. Anonymous comments are fine; getting to know your commenting community is way better. (Check out this great post by our own David Recordon.) It’s time to try TypePad Connect, don’t you think?
  • Spiffed up TypePad Profiles. Now you can share more about your interests and favorites. Take a minute to update your TypePad profile and track your conversations around TypePad Connect-powered sites.

We've also added in a bunch of small bug fixes to TypePad. Here's a quick list:

  • Fixed “date published” for approved comments
  • Fixed archive calendar
  • Fixed Amazon wishlists
  • Improved comment notification emails
  • Made the "password reset" email more clear
  • “New blog” notification for TypePad Business Class blogs

And a few for TypePad Connect:

  • Made “share email address” setting immediately after registration
  • Leaving a comment is faster!
  • OpenID improvements for the US and Japan
  • Improved Profiles, so TypePad Connect profiles on your site can have your look-and-feel
  • Auto-linking of URL's in comments
  • Fixed “Recent Comments” link

Want to request a feature? Let us know through your account in a help ticket, or leave us a comment!


TypePad and Twitter: @sixapart

Speaking of Twitter, we really love using it to connect with our community. We like to keep our posts on our Twitter stream fresh, relevant, and brief to suit the medium of microblogging. We like to keep our messages to a general one-per-day at most, unless something exciting is happening. We use the @sixapart account to talk about all of our products, as well as the company at large.

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For TypePad, we try to keep an eye on both the good (check out some of our favorites) and on some of the challenges our bloggers have been experiencing, and to try to get connected with the community as a whole. We want to listen.

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We don’t use public @messages to troubleshoot technical issues too often – we prefer to direct message or email people who are having technical challenges, since typically this belongs with our awesome tech support team.  Tools for tracking the technical issues in blogs are something best suited to our custom-built ticket system. We do love direct messages and answer them all, but for more complex issues, 140 characters isn’t always enough.

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We do like to reach out and contact people who are Tweeting about issues, to find out what we can do to help.  If there’s something that we need to talk about with the whole community, then we’ll either Tweet publicly, or you can also look here at Everything TypePad for news and updates.

Are you following us on Twitter yet?


Favorite Blogs: Jaffe Juice

6a00d83451fd0a69e20105368c2a74970b-800wi Jaffe Juice is the blog from Joseph Jaffe:  President and Chief Interruptor of crayon, a strategic consultancy firm that encourages its clients to "join the conversation". With two books and endless articles to his name, Joseph says the primary objectives of Jaffe Juice are three-fold:

  1. As an industry evangelist, to walk my talk and understand conversational marketing from the inside out
  2. To generate interest and leads for crayon
  3. As a thought leadership platform, to secure speaking engagements, press inquiries and partnership opportunities

A few of our favorite posts are: "how many social media experts does it take to make 2009 predictions", about if the glass is half full or half empty: "who cares is it's full of 18 year old scotch", and about the communications challenge the Big 3 automakers have.

Visit Jaffe Juice.


TypePad and Twitter

Our friends at Twitter have obviously been working on improving security this week, and it seems they've made a tweak that's temporarily causing an annoyance for some of our bloggers. Anybody with a Twitter widget or script on a TypePad blog is being prompted for a Twitter login. We're talking to the Twitter team to get that fixed ASAP, but until then, just ignore the login prompt, or temporarily disable the widget if you don't want to annoy your readership.

Want to follow us on Twitter? We love new friends.