TypePad Hacks

It was way cool to meet the Design Team and see the place where the magic happens. After touring the office, Michael Sippey, Harold Check (of TypePad Featured Blogs), and I went out to lunch at a nearby Thai place. I'll have to ask them the name of the place, because it was the best Thai food I've ever had. We talked about some of the things they're working on for the future, my plans for TypePad Hacks, and ideas about how to improve the user experience for TypePad bloggers.... We really hit it off and found that we have a lot of the same ideas.

I was able to speed it up somewhat by keeping a text file of the code ready to paste in, but still… It's so much easier to have it integrated into the app. Built-in tagging is one of the three biggest reasons I started writing most of my posts using Ecto.... Technorati Tags are used by Technorati and other blog-oriented search engines to index your posts so people can find them.... The other reason Tags are great is that they allow you to pare the categories you use on your blog down to the essential. If you have too many categories it can be just as bad as having none… there's a limit to how much attention span the averagee reader is going to have, and they aren't likely to scroll down an endless sidebar list of categories to see if you have what they want.... I just did a remake of one of my other blogs and one of the things I was most excited about was revamping the categories so that they made more sense and took up less space.

Yesterday we added a few new features to TypePad that also came straight off the Most Wanted list. Even if these new features weren't on your personal list, we think you'll find them useful...... You can set comment status (open or closed), TrackBack status (accept or don't accept) or assign categories on multiple posts at once.... Starting a new blog and want to introduce first time readers to your topic?... (And for those of you taking advantage of Custom CSS, we assign a special classname to that post, so that you can style it differently from the rest of your posts...)

They're great people, have very responsive tech support and provide a lot of really great metrics, all for free (there's a paid version that gives you access to more data, but I've been more than happy with the basic service). What really makes FeedBurner useful though is the fact that they make it much, much easier for your readers to subscribe to your feed whether they understand RSS or not. FeedBurner also provides a lot of great related services such as automatically pinging all the major blog search engines when you update your blog, managing advertising services within your feed, and creating feed flare (the cool links at the bottom of each post on this blog that let you email posts, submit them to digg, etc). I'm very pleased to see the two companies working together so closely… especially because FeedBurner has created a lot of truly innovative ways to extend RSS into a powerful new medium in it's own right.... You might also want to subscribe to the feed for the comments (where it says "join the conversation" in the sidebar) because some of the smartest things said on this blog are said by other people commenting on posts!

There are four things you can do to help make this blog a better resource for everyone: Leave comments on the posts to let me know more about what you need. This blog aims to become the best resource possible, and I do take reqests. Link to this blog from your own blog, so other Typepad bloggers can get involved in the conversation. Subscribe to the feed, so that you won't miss any of the excitement to come. Submit hacks, links to third party tools or blogging news, or request a feature that would make TypePad even better.