The Half Yearly Mark

The TypePad team has been hard at work delivering great discovery, distribution and community tools to our bloggers. If you haven't had a chance to keep up with all the changes, here's a recap of features you should be checking out.

• Want great search integrated into the look and feel of your blog? We now have a native, blogside search feature. Simply add search to your sidebar in one-click from Design > Content and your readers can search posts, pages and comments from your blog.
• A well-designed font can help give your blog personality, and help it stand out in the crowd. We've partnered with Typekit, a great new company that's bringing professional fonts to the web. 
• As bloggers ourselves, we like to build tools that help you get out there and be discovered. Which is why we’ve made social tools – like follow, favorite, re-blog and the reader toolbar – a big part of the TypePad platform.
• Social media outreach can help you gain new audiences for your blog. With Social Stats, bloggers can now see traffic from referrers plus social media sources like Facebook, Twitter and Bit.ly. And most recently TypePad released integration with Facebook's "Like" feature and Facebook Friend Finder, making it easier than ever to share your content with networks on Facebook.
• Last but not least, are you a developer? We have a whole slew of APIs available such as Twitter and Twitpic and Blog and Search APIs where developers can build new social and publishing applications leveraging TypePad's infrastructure. 

It's been a great first half of the year and we're looking to deliver even better features in the latter half. Stay tuned!

Comments

[♥ Yakini @ The Prissy Mommy Chronicles ♥]

These changes are great, thank you.

However, I would really like a blogroll developed for Typepad that is similar to the BlogSpot one. On BlogSpot you can opt to include a link to your friend's latest post, and it arranges the order of the blogroll depending on recency of friends' last post.

I'd also like a plug-in like CommentLuv, since it doesnt work on Typepad (although it works with Wordpress and BlogSpot)

[Bobbiefx]

Thank you for you effort

[Ricardo Barrera]

Could you devote more resources to improving the editor. It's still too quirky. Very difficult to format anything without it doing what it wants to do. It inserts different font sizes arbitrarily. It gets mixed up between the paragraph tag and the blockquote tag. There are many other quirks. Other online editors don't have these issues.

[Mark Thoma]

Seeing this is very annoying. I have been trying to get you to fix the Twitter code for advanced templates for months. It doesn't shorten urls (the button in standard templates does this automatically), and if urls are long enough, as is common with a long blog name and title, the code actually fails. If you have a long title, there's no way to post to Twitter using the button/link that is given by Typepad for advanced templates. Even if the title doesn't cross the character limit, if the url is, say, 135 characters, on 5 characters of th title will show. Pretty useless. Typepad ought to be embarrassed at having code that doesn't work on their site, and they do know about it because I've told them several times, but they apparently don't much care.

[This has an easy fix, I've suggested it several times to no avail. Grrr.]

When I tried to press TypePad to fix this, the person helping me got a bit snotty and basically said we'll get to it when we feel like it. Great, thanks for the, uh, was that support?

Support for advanced templates is waning. At this point, unless thing improve, if you are thinking of using anything but the standard templates (which are a bit limiting), I'd suggest another platform. Typepad used to be great at this, even offering to help with code at times, but no more. If you, say, put the social networking button on your site from the code they offer, they won't even work. When you fix their code (yes, more code that doesn't work, and this is a bit tedious to correct), you find the buttons aren't even the same shade of gray as in standard templates. Again, support for advanced templates is failing, and the support people cannot or will not fill in the gaps.

I say all of this reluctantly, I am a featured blog in Typepad, but part of what they are featuring -- the social networking button for Twitter -- doesn't work and that is frustrating, particularly when I've tried and tried to get more than the run around from support.

It's a disadvantage to me not to have a working Twitter button -- outclicks from the Twitter button have fallen as people realize it doesn't shorten the urls and is hence rather useless -- and all I can tell them is that Typepad doesn't seem to care.

Please fix this.

[Mark Thoma]

Too late to edit -- this part refers to social networking buttons/links generally, not just Twitter:

If you, say, put the social networking button[s] on your site from the code they offer, they won't even work. When you fix their code (yes, more code that doesn't work, and this is a bit tedious to correct), you find the buttons aren't even the same shade of gray as in standard templates. Again, support for advanced templates is failing, and the support people cannot or will not fill in the gaps.

[nicaraguareforestation]

I have long given up with the editors - the HTML editor jumps all over the place and the rich text editor I won't even write about (although I did once)!
I now use Notepad++ and cut and paste between it and the HTML editor. Much quicker, easier and no frustrations.

[Ricardo Barrera]

Thanks for the tip re NotePad++ The post below is so mad about stuff that he may dump Typepad for a different platform!

[Account Deleted]

When trying to upgrade, and contacting support, I found that your service to be generally unhelpful. Du bist verruckt. Du musst nach Holle, ja!!!

[Вал Вълков]

So nice

[The Typepad Team]

We now have a new Compose Editor in Beta. See the latest post about this: http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2010/07/beta-a-new-and-improved-compose-editor.html. Try it out and let us know what you think!

[John]

the "new" compose editor just lost a bunch of my written but unsaved content because i used spell check. way to go guys. nice work. i am a paying customer and that's the crap i have to put up with. here's what i think: get it right. and give me a month's credit.

[H. Mark Delman]

Thanks for the updates. I did a quick test of the search feature and thought it did a pretty good job.

One suggestion with regard to new Facebook feature..... Some readers may not recognize the "thumbs up" fan icon. I would suggest you change to the adjacent copy from "Become a fan" to "Become a fan on Facebook"

-http://www.PlanterTomato.com

[Scottitude]

Found the post about the "new and improved compose editor" on the main Everything TypePad page but the link above results in:

"Sorry, the page you were looking for could not be found
Showing related results for: http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2010/07/beta-a-new-and-improv...
"

[Scottitude]

The new features are probably appreciated by those using basic template designs but as others have pointed out, most of the exciting new TypePad developments fail miserably for those of us using advanced templates.

It used to be simple; modify a template, convert to advanced, publish changes.

It's not rocket science so what's the deal, TypePad?

[Account Deleted]

bne bn cozemedım bu sayfayı

[George Pla]

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