An API for sidebar content

Last week, we launched a number of new features on the TypePad service, but Professional Network members might be most interested in the new Notes TypeList. TypeLists are the sidebar content like lists of links, books, music, and blogrolls that you can easily update with the TypePad service. And Notes TypeLists are little blocks of any arbitrary HTML that you want to put on the side of your blog.

We've offered an Atom API for updating TypeLists for more than a year now. But even more exciting is that the new Notes TypeList supports the Atom API as well. That means that you can now insert content into a TypePad blog's sidebar using the API.

So, if you've got a service that requires dropping javascript onto a site, or if you want to make it point-and-click simple to include a badge or button linking to your site on your sidebar, it's now just a simple matter of updating a Notes TypeList.

We'll be publishing more details on this, including full API docs, in the future, but this is a good start at seeing how one day's worth of hacking can result in some really great development going into a product.