This week in updates: Commenting, Themes, and more

We’re doing a ton of work on the preview of the all new TypePad (already in beta). We’re working on getting it ready for everyone to preview and work with in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can read the Beta Blog to find out more about how the preview is shaping up, and how your feedback has informed and inspired our development.

For everyone this week, we’ve made some great updates and improvements, focusing on fixes that have been the most requested by you in the TypePad community, and with more to come in the coming weeks, especially around commenting. This week's update includes:

Commenting-

• Signing in to external services using TypePad as an Open ID wasn’t working for some people as expected - we’ve fixed this now, and more fixes are coming next week.
• Previous/Next links to navigate back and forth in your comments is now working as expected again.
• Posts closed for comments were still getting comments – let us know if you still see this happening.
• TypePad Connect: External logins with Facebook, Google, et cetera, are now showing the correct name.
• TypePad Connect: Flagging one comment as SPAM no longer hides all comments on that post.

We’ve done some housekeeping fixes, too, to make some features you like in TypePad are more intuitive. We updated the confirmation message you see when you're deleting a blog: now it is much more clear, so that you don’t delete something by mistake. We’re also planning to shift the delete blog function to be less prominent, so you don’t accidentally delete something important when you don’t intend to.

Changes to your credit card or billing address will now show under your “Billing History”, making it easier you to see what’s going on in your account.

My personal favorite feature for this week is that all new blogs will default to our new Journal Black theme. It’s been this same blue default theme when you get started with a new blog for WAY too long! Journal is cool, because you can do all sorts of neat things with it, like using a background image, or customize it without advanced templates. Read more about how to do that and other ways to make your blog beautiful at our designer Jim Ramsey’s blog: allaboutblogdesign.com

There’s more to come that’s even more exciting. Got a favorite feature you want to see? Let us know in the comments.

Comments

[Catching The Waves]

TypePad is now responding to users' needs and has therefore become a much more attractive blogging platform. It has recognised that it needed to keep pace with Wordpress, Blogger and their ilk. Hats off to the programmers.

Suggestions? I'd like to see Search and Translation integrated into templates rather than shoehorned in via a widget. Similarly, adding a widget should be much more transparent; there is no preview to see what a blog will look like once a widget has been added. (I've said previously that the new post preview is a big improvement.)

The spellcheck can be slow and awkward to use. A thesaurus would be most handy, as would a glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice. In fact, skip the rest: give me the last and I'll be happy. :)

[Catching The Waves]

I've, er, just noticed that there is a widget preview function. Sowwy.

The internet: making your stupidity global.

[Brian Hines]

Ginevra, I've asked for this feature before, but it never hurts to ask again. Me and the active commenters on my blogs would love to be able to have more than the ten most recent comments shown in the sidebar (or somewhere else).

One person who feels strongly about a topic can fill up most of the "Recent Comments" list in the sidebar with his or her own comments. I've had people then comment, in effect, "Hey, dude, be less verbose; we can't tell who else is commenting on which posts."

It just isn't right for as many posts as comments to be shown in the sidebar (currently, a maximum of ten each). One of my posts can get many comments -- dozens often in a day or two.

Blog visitors want to know where the comment action is. Presently TypePad doesn't have a way of making this known, other than showing the ten most recent comments, which may not be representative of where the most active commenting is happening on a blog.

[Werner Patels @ The Right Comment]

I really like the fact that you have switched to Journal as your default template for new blogs. Being a user of that template myself, I can honestly say that it's the best template in your collection of (all excellent) templates! Good job.

Btw, I agree with Brian: having a bit more flexibility in the number of posts shown under Recent Posts would be welcome (e.g., reducing or increasing that number).

[Nathalie]

I agree, I want a flexible post module so that I can set it to more or less than 10...

Cheers!
Nathalie

[Ez]

I love the new and improved features.
As for requests...I've requested it before, but it's worth repeating:
I would LOVE a way to set "random rotation" for certain typelists. For example, it would be fabulous if my ad sponsors ads would automatically rotate each page load instead of how I currently do it (manually - which is a huge pain).

Thanks so much! -Ez

[1001noisycameras]

I agree with the fellow bloggers above that being able to specify the exact number of recent posts would increase flexibility! I think it would be a nice addition!

And the post above by Ez has given me an idea for a fun new feature, if/when the TypePad developers are looking for a pet project: A "show random post" button. It can be a fun way for new readers to discover a blog's previous content at their pace, without having to dig through Archives.

[Account Deleted]

*sigh* I tried subscribing to the feed for Beta Blog, but got this error message:

"Internet Explorer cannot display this feed. This feed contains code errors."