Everything Typepad

Favorite Blogs: Cute With Chris

 Cute With Chris is a quirky and adorable blog about animals, sort of like a demented little brother to our friends at Cute Overload. Each Monday, Chris posts up a new video of his show, followed throughout the week by user-submitted cute animal photos of their favorite pets doing strange and entertaining things, like a cat who thinks he's spiderman.. By using categories, Chris makes it easier for the viewer to investigate this strange, yet adorable world. (Men with lady names is a favorite of mine.) He's even taking his show on the road!

Visit Cute With Chris.

Adding Feedburner Email Alerts to Your TypePad Blog (Video)

Feedburner is Google's service for tracking your blog's feed subscribers and what content they click on. You can also use it to add email alerts so readers that aren't RSS-savvy can get your posts delivered instantly to their inbox.

First you have to connect your blog to Feedburner:

Then, add the email alerts and subscription form to your blog (here's the text instructions Ginevra posted a few weeks ago)

The Latest Update to TypePad

Need help with designing the best blog? Look no further than your friends at TypePad One, and we're here to help. Need our help with designing (or re-designing) your blog? We can do that!

More a DIY type? Attend a free seminar with us, or watch our free how-to videos.

Other than our favorite new themes, here's some of the other bugfixes and enhancements we've made to TypePad with our latest release.

• Introduced new comment pagination control for users with Advanced Templates: If you have advanced templates and get a lot of comments, if pagination is giving you a headache, just give us a shout in your Help Tickets.
• We've got Featured Widgets! In the design section, under content, check out Outbrain, Twitter, iLike, and ShareThis.
• Got a business blog that needs invoicing? Check out TypePad Business Class.
• Fixed comment permalink issues! Now links to specific comments from the "most recent comments" section and from emails will work.

Additional fixes:

• Enhanced registration flow for new users
• Profiles retained more easily for upgrades/downgrades
  
• Comment notification emailnow points to the comment permalink
• Improved notification emails/billing flow
• fixed pagination on Profiles
• Count is correct on the 'List Comments' page when editing a comment with a banned word.
  
  

We're happy we can keep helping improving your blogging experience - there's more to come shortly, including some of those remaining issues you might still be having with comments.

Favorite Blogs: Beth's Blog on How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Every week, we like to feature a blog that's one of our favorites. Have a blog you think should be nominated for "Best Of The Bloggers"? Leave your suggestions in the comments!

Beth Kanter teaches non-profits how they can best use social media strategies to stay ahead of the curve in the Web 2.0 world. Her work involves teaching non-profits how to use web technologies like blogging, photosharing, and social networking sites.With low overhead and instant results, social media connects people for a cause.

Through her blog, Beth's been able to raise over $200,000 for a cause dear to her - orphans in Cambodia.

Beth's blog incorporates all of these learnings - building relationships, rewards, and conversation on and about the web.

Visit Beth's Blog.

I Love Blogging: 'Things Out of My Head and Into Yours'

This post is part of our I Love Blogging Valentine's Day celebration. In this post, Michael, our resident Mad Men expert, lists why he loves blogging:

I was tagged for two things this week — one for a post about how much I love blogging, and another for that “25 things” meme that’s making its way around the web. I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, so here are 25 things I love about blogs, blogging and bloggers. In no particular order…

1. Blogging is about passion.
2. Bloggers love good food. Like Michael Ruhlman does.
3. Blogs are good for Sharing Right Now and Saving For Later.
4. Bloggers are great filters. Like Jason Kottke is.
5. Bloggers love art. Like Tyler Green does.
6. Blogging lets me get things out of my head and into yours.
7. Bloggers make beautiful things. Like Blair Peter does.
8. Blogging lets me keep it short or stretch it out, depending on just how much I want to say.
9. Bloggers are obsessed with pop culture. Like Rich Juzwiak is.
10. Blogs feed the Googlebot. And the Googlebot is hungry.
11. Bloggers find things you don’t. Like Rex Sorgatz and Andy Baio do.
12. My blog is the number one result for my name in Google. And I like it that way.
13. Blogs changed media…but not in that “David slaying Goliath” way that everyone thought they would way back when.
14. Blogs are simple.
15. Bloggers love architecture. Like Dan Hill does.
16. My blog helped me meet some of my best friends.
17. Bloggers write great books. LIke Steven Johnson does.
18. My blog is an endless source of fascination for the few people I know who don’t blog. I’m working on ‘em.
19. Blogging is easy.
20. My blog is mine. I’m the host of the conversation.
21. Blogging is therapy for information overload disease.
22. My blog is an archive of my life. You might not care about what I was doing and thinking five years ago, but I do.
23. Bloggers are green. Like Zem Joaquin is.
24. Bloggers overshare. Like Daisy Barringer does, and like I’m doing with this post.
25. Blogs are made of people.

Michael Sippey is a VP of Products at Six Apart. He's been blogging since 1995 and blogs today at sippey.typepad.com and michael.vox.com.

I Love Blogging: 'Completely Addictive'

This post is part of our I Love Blogging Valentine's Day celebration. In this post, daisy, our resident cocktail expert and serial non-dater, reveals why she loves blogging:

When you date guys who keep computer files titled "Lipsticks I'm Allergic to," drunkenly remove their American flag t-shirts in crowded bars, let you know they're dating someone else via their Facebook status, and tell you you're intimidating because you're funny, pretty, and, you know, "older," it's sort of your job to blog about it. At least that's what I tell myself; the guys in question might disagree...

When I first started blogging in the spring of 2005, I didn't know what I wanted my blog to be. I was supposed to be hard at work on my M.F.A. thesis, but found myself instead writing obsessive blog posts about Tom and Katie's burgeoning love life, my humbling part-time gig as a hostess, and, of course, inappropriate rants I've since deleted. (I had no idea if you linked to someone they could tell, which led to my first major blogging faux-pas. Ah, to be young and naïve and a blogger.)

I Love Blogging: 'A Great Meal Can Bring Happiness'

This post is part of our I Love Blogging Valentine's Day celebration. Alex Deve, our resident hungry Frenchman, reveals why he loves blogging:

I believe in people, and I believe that in every one of us, there exists a huge potential. This potential comes in many forms: for good, to bring peace, to love, and to help your neighbor. There is also the potential to invent the next big thing that will change the world for the better or simply the potential to evolve ideas.

I also believe in listening and in talking - the art, as they say, of conversation. Conversations can do a lot: they can bring an understanding of different opinions, for example, or exposure to different points of views or religions. You can hear new ideas and talk about how you can contribute to them. You can disagree. You can agree. You can talk about the things you like or dislike, and you can lend your voice to the dialog that exists all around you. You can, at the end of the day, be heard, and even listen for calls from others that want to be heard. In effect, you can help.

That's why I love blogging: because I believe in people, and I believe in the power of conversations. Because it's our differences that make us stronger, and our conversations about those differences that make us human. There are millions of bloggers, communicating every day, on millions of different topics, important only to themselves, and occasionally to a few others. That exchange is fundamental to our lives and to our happiness.

I blog about food and drinks on the Hungry Frenchman. I do not pretend to be a great writer. Actually, because English is not my mother tongue, I cannot express myself fully, which is frustrating. But even though my words are limited, my ideas are infinite and I strive to convey these ideas in my blog. It is the idea that a great meal or dish can bring happiness. It is the idea that sharing a drink (and sometimes more) with good friends is a priceless moment that one should fully enjoy. It is the idea that great quality food is such a gift that we should cherish it. And, most importantly, it is the idea that food and drink bring people together, perhaps to share face to face that long lost art of conversation.

New Theme!

We've added a new theme that I really like. It's in 5 colorways: black, grey, green, red and orange.

It's called Journal, and it's available in the "New Themes" section in your design area. Here's a screenshot:

 

Why I <3 Blogging

This post is part of our I Love Blogging Valentine's Day celebration.

When I first started writing on the web, (on Tripod, then Geocities) it was almost a revolutionary moment. I've always loved to write, and so I posted some of my awful angsty poetry. Seeing my own work reflected back at me on the screen gave me a new sense of "I really just MADE that".

My writing no longer just sat in a spiral notebook.

I didn't really see what I did as "blogging", per se, until I started writing about my own life from a first-person perspective, which was coincidentally on Blogger, sometime in 2002. I liked that the very name of the product told me who I was. I was a blogger! I can blog! There was a name for all the noodly typing I'd been doing on the internet. I started reading some great blogs. Pamie, Anil Dash, Dooce, Tomato Nation, and Balk's The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.

 When I started working at Six Apart in 2004, I moved my blog to TypePad. Ah HA, I thought, now I can actually -play- with this blog of mine. I started tinkering around with TypeLists, the most popular of which was a revolving list of "things my dog has eaten". (included: a box of red oolong tea, 12 marshmallow peeps, 4 pairs of cute shoes.)

I could alter my design the way I liked. I could be proud of my blog for how it looked not just to me, but to the world.

TypePad One is Here for All Bloggers

As part of our I Love Blogging launch this week we also wanted to shout to the stars that we love bloggers too!

To celebrate our love of bloggers of all types, topics and platforms, we’re launching TypePad One, your one-stop shop for blogging training, tips, tools, services and support. Whether you’re wanting to know how to add your Twitter tweets to TypePad, domain map with Go Daddy, add Feedburner email alerts or add your blog posts to your Facebook feed, we’ve got your back with tutorials and techniques to help you get the most out of every post.

TypePad One also serves as your entrée into our various support offerings including the Power Launch and Blog Tune-Up packages.

To download the full low-down go to http://typepad.com/one/.