Three Mistakes Even TypePad Pros Make

I work with TypePad advanced templates on a daily basis, but I'm prone to miss a few things here and there, just like anyone else.  Here are three "gotchas" I ran into just this week...

1. When redirecting a blog's non-www domain name to its www subdomain (a must-have SEO and usability feature of any web site or blog) through GoDaddy, I accidently left a trailing "/" character on the end of URL to redirect to.  The results were less than stellar, and it took me a good while to hunt down my mistake, because my first thought was that I had coded something incorrectly within one of the Advanced Templates I was customizing.
2. Along with the first point above, I had been working on customizing a banner directly in the banner template module (yes, you can customize a banner using just your stylesheet, but I prefer to do it with a custom template module so that customers can easily see how to change the banner if and when they want to), and I wanted to drop in a large banner image.  So, I coded up the image using the <$MTBlogURL$> tag, but inserted the relative path of the image as "/images/whatever.jpg".  Again, the results were less than spectacular.  Leave off the "/" character - it's built into the MT tag for you.
3. While doing a live training and design session with a client using WebEx, I was asked if I could change the name of a TypeList, as the TypeList's name is what appears as the module header text on your web site, and the client wanted something other than what I had come up with.  "Sure, that's easy!"  Well, yeah, it's easy to change the name of a TypeList, but then you have to change the associated call to the <$MTListInclude> tag to make it work when you're using Advanced Templates. That's the part you forget about, and your blog won't publish properly if TypePad can't find the TypeList because you changed its name.

These are all minor mistakes that we all make, and although we probably know more about TypePad and Advanced Templates than just about anyone, the difference is that we find and fix these little things without skipping a beat, and we have this great blog to tell you about little tips and tricks (AKA "Hacks").