My Favorite New TypePad Feature

Over at Six Apart News, Ben writes about the motivation behind us holding a one-day internal hackathon at the company. Besides being a nice break from the usual work our engineers do, this hacking session led to the feature set of our latest TypePad release -- which we have been internally calling our "Scratchathon Release."

Ben writes -- in his post -- about the goal of the "Scratchathon":

So we decided to have a one-day hacking session that we called a Scratchathon--as in, scratching an itch. We stopped the usual project work for a day, and engineers on all of our products spent the day working on features like those described above. The focus for this session was on implementing relatively small features and/or fixes that would have a big impact for ourselves, our customers, and our support staff, and the explicit goal was to quickly channel these features into a product release.

While we'll be detailing the new features over at Everything TypePad, I just have to write about my favorite little new feature in this latest version:

You can now use a checkbox to select which of your photo albums you want to display in your sidebar. For those of you who use TypePad, this is going to be a much welcomed addition. Believe me, not having the ability to choose specific photo albums has bugged me since day one of TypePad.

We'll be publishing an interview with Nick O'Neill, the developer at Six Apart who integrated this feature into TypePad. Look for that later this week (along with interviews with other developers from Six Apart).