TypePad Hacks

I love the new format… Not only is it prettier, but it seems much more functional than the old style of comment notification.... Also, I way blew it on reporting the last big design change that dealt with TypeLists… If you haven't looked at your lists in the last month or so, there are a lot of major improvements to the TypeList interface. especially the ability to easily see the correct code for adding them to Advanced Template blogs (under the Publish tab). A quick tip I've been meaning to share: When you go to the Publish Tab for any Typelist, there's a list of links to all your advanced templates sets.... When I work on a redesign for those sites, it's handy to be able to easily open the design page for each blog by clicking the links on the TypeList Publish tab.

The simplest solution is to encourage your readers to subscribe to your blog's feed and read your posts in RSS… But of course, when they do that, they don't see your nifty widgets at all, nor any of the rest of the site design you've worked so hard on. Also, not everyone understands RSS (for a truly brilliant explanation, you might want to put a link to How to explain RSS the Oprah way below your subscribe button).... The hacks described in the extended entry of this post will show you how to create a fast-loading blog that matches the overall design of your blog while stripping out the slow bits.... How to create a fast-loading secondary blog: Fred's second solution for slow page loads is a little more work to set up, but is a really great idea: He created a second blog that mirrored his content.... Rick answered my question with the following: We have a commercial publisher front-end to FeedBurner-hosted feeds called FeedFoundry, and one of the features of FeedFoundry is the ability to create custom XSLT pages that will style a feed.... What you'll want to do is create a copy of the index page and sidebar templates for your blog based on your current design, and edit out the items that slow down load speeds.

They're a nifty little mix of CSS and Javascript that allow you to annotate your expanded thoughts in a little box off to the side of a blog post. Footnotes are a drag because they pull you out of the context by making you travel back and forth to the bottom of a page… one of the best things about reading online is that you can actually link to footnotes (and provide a return link) in order to minimize the hassle of navigating to the expanded information.... The box sets them off so that you know what they are, and you can choose to read them (or not) without breaking the flow of concentration.... Because they're styled with CSS you can easily change the appearance, but somehow, it just didn't really move me and shortly thereafter dropped off my radar. The original version required a bit of template modification to include the Javascript (it's possible you could just drop it in a Typelist, but I'm not sure.

In the duplicate, you'll tinker with the <MTEntries> tag as I outline below, paste in your AdSense code, save the new module, and then swap out the default entry-list module for the new-and-improved module in your Main Index template.... 6) Now press Command + V (Ctrl + V) again to paste a second copy of the original entry-list code directly beneath the first set. The module should now contain two identical sets of <MTEntries> containers.... Step 5: Alter the <MTEntries> tags in the custom entry-list-main module 1) In the first <MTEntries> tag, set the value of the lastn attribute.... In Parent Hacks, I display a single post before my AdSense unit, so my first <MTEntries> tag looks like this: <MTEntries lastn="1"> ...... </MTEntries> (In English: show the next nine entries, starting with the second entry) If, instead of a single AdSense unit between the first and second post, you want to insert AdSense after say, every second post, your entry-list-main module would look something like this: <MTEntries lastn="2"> ...

Navigate to this page in TypePad's Knowledge Base (preferably in a new tab or browser window) and copy the entry-individual template module code.... Scroll down until you see the following line of code: <h3 class="entry-header"><$MTEntryTitle$></h3> Replace that line of code with the following: <h3 class="entry-header"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></h3> Click save. Navigate to this page in TypePad's Knowledge Base and copy the entry-list template module code.... Scroll down until you see the following line of code: <h3 class="entry-header"><$MTEntryTitle$></h3> Replace that line of code with the following: <h3 class="entry-header"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></h3> and click save.... If you created new template modules in the previous steps, follow the next set of instructions: If you created new template modules for entry-individual and entry-list, return to the Design tab.

I'm still working on some advanced template code to make author's comments stand out… In the mean time, here's a Hack suggested by Nuthatch for styling your comments to your own blog: One person requested, " I'd like an easy way to style the author's comments to make them stand out from reader comments."... When you leave a comment on your own blog, just style it in bold, or color, or whatever distinctive way you like using HTML tags.... I'd add one suggestion to this… Rather than adding the HTML tags to your own comments at the time you post them, I'd use the edit comments feature on the list comments page to add them in after. That way, you can go back and make sure that all your own comments on your blog are formatted the same way.... So you might also want to copy your comment to your clipboard before posting the edited version, just to be safe.