Announcements

07.19.2006

Chat with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail

Back in October 2004, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson penned one of the most influential magazine articles of recent times, "The Long Tail." The Wired cover story explored the impact that improved searching and better filters have had on selling products and services, making it possible to profit from items that aren't "hits" in the Top 100 sense. Increasingly, Anderson suggests, niche products that alone sell relatively few units will together make up the majority of sales for many businesses.

The idea has become one of the most popular memes for bloggers who write about business and culture, and over the past 20 months has taken hold in the mainstream as thinkers and consumers alike realize the implications of the shift. And Hyperion has just published Anderson's book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More in hardcover.

On Monday, July 24 at 1:30 PM PDT, we'll be hosting a moderated SkypeCast discussion with Anderson. To participate, all you'll need is Skype and this link: skypecasts.skype.com. We couldn't be more excited about this event!

In the meantime, check out our interview with Anderson over on featured.typepad.com, where he talks about how he used his TypePad blog to expand on the ideas in the original Wired article, connect with his readers and evolve his thinking about Long Tail economics.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 05:48 AM | Permalink

07.12.2006

TypePad Status Update

Update - July 14, 9 pm PDT

We've now restored all user data. If you are still experiencing any issues, please open a support ticket.

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We apologize for the interruption in service that occurred during most of the day on July 12, 2006. We experienced a database problem and needed to take the system offline to repair it.

Weblogs were never down, and the application came back up about 7:30 pm PDT.

If you made any changes to your weblog during the period 12:30 am to 10:30 am PDT, while the application was available intermittently before we took it down, you may need to take steps to restore those posts from your archives.

This does not affect all users, but only those who posted between 12:30 am and 10:30 am. If you did not make any changes to your weblog between 12:30 am and 10:30 am on July 12th, your weblog content will not be affected by the application downtime.

If you did post during this period, these posts are not available inside of TypePad. However, they have not been completely lost and can still be found on your weblog individual archives.

We've written a knowledge base article, Restoring posts from July 12, 2006 service outage to explain how you can restore these posts and their images.

If you have any questions or experience any additional problems, please log in to your account and open a help ticket. Our Support team will be glad to help you.

Posted by Technical Support at 10:00 PM | Permalink

07.05.2006

Two del.icio.us Widgets

One of the motivations behind TypePad Widgets was a frequent customer question: "How can I share my del.icio.us links on my TypePad blog?" We were getting good -- too good -- at giving customers complicated instructions on how to do that, and decided there had to be a better way. And that, dear reader, is how Widgets were born.

Which is why I’m thrilled today to announce Joshua Schachter and the other kind folks at del.icio.us added Widget support to their Linkroll and Tagroll features. If you’re a TypePad user, all you need to do to put your links or tags on the sidebar of your blog is sign in to del.icio.us, configure how you want your Linkroll or Tagroll to look, and click the "Add this to your TypePad blog" link under the box that has all the messy code (that you used to have to copy and paste).

Many thanks to the del.icio.us team – the TypePad team couldn’t be happier.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 04:30 PM | Permalink

06.26.2006

Get some Flare for your blog

If you've connected your blog's feed to FeedBurner, last week we made it dead simple to add FeedBurner's FeedFlare to your blog. FeedFlare allows you to add little links at the bottom of your posts -- both in your feed and on your blog -- to let your readers do things like add the post to del.icio.us, digg it, email it, etc. FeedBurner lets you pick different items for your blog and feed, and there are dozens of Flare items to choose from.

Learn more about FeedFlare at FeedBurner, and to learn just how easy it is to add some Flare to your blog, check out our Knowledge Base article on Using FeedBurner with TypePad.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 08:30 AM | Permalink

06.23.2006

More from the Most Wanted list

The most trafficked page on the TypePad team's internal wiki (yes, we use wikis as well as blogs) is titled "Most Wanted." It's the list of frequenty requested features, fixes and enhancements we keep (and constantly review) based on the support tickets we answer, the blog posts we read, and the customers we talk to. Many of the recent enhancements we've made to TypePad -- keyword banning, separate comment and TrackBack moderation, even warning you before you navigate away from an unsaved post -- have come straight off that list.

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...

Continue reading “More from the Most Wanted list”

Posted by Michael Sippey at 09:30 AM | Permalink

06.21.2006

Trumba and Mercora: two great new Widgets

We've recently added two new partners to the Widget program: Trumba, the web-based calendar publishing system, and Mercora, the world's largest (and legal) music radio network.

The Trumba Upcoming Events widget lets you display a live summary of upcoming events you recommend. Use it to show off the conferences you're attending, the book readings you're giving, your tour dates, or your just summer travel plans...whatever you think is noteworthy. Trumba makes it easy to create a calendar and share it with the world -- and they've integrated the "add to TypePad" feature right inside their publishing tools.

Passionate about music? The Mercora MusicSearch widget lets your readers search, find and listen to a collection of more than 3,000,000 songs by more than 200,000 artists. Mercora's network of music is streamed from individuals making their collections available for webcasting.

More great widgets are on the way. And if you're interested in developing your own Widgets, check out our Developer Documentation; we'd love to have your Widgets in the Gallery.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 08:30 AM | Permalink

06.07.2006

Connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner

We've been fans of FeedBurner for quite a while – they know the technology, business and user experience of feeds and content syndication better than pretty much anyone on the planet. And they've built a great service that enables bloggers to manage their feeds, publicize their content, track reader statistics and earn a bit of money along the way.

This afternoon we introduced a new feature to TypePad that we're very excited about. You can now seamlessly connect your TypePad weblog's feed to FeedBurner. If you're already using FeedBurner, this means once you connect your feed, all of your readers who subscribe to your TypePad feeds will automatically receive that content from FeedBurner. And if you're not using FeedBurner on your blog, once you have a FeedBurner account we make it really easy for you to create a new feed there, and connect it to your TypePad blog.

To connect your weblog's feed to FeedBurner, sign in to TypePad and visit the freshly redesigned Feeds page under the Configure tab for your blog.

Continue reading “Connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner”

Posted by Michael Sippey at 06:55 PM | Permalink

05.24.2006

Feedback in moderation, and a new Widget

This afternoon we released two new features that are the latest in our efforts to provide TypePad bloggers the best tools for growing and managing an active community of readers and commenters.

• You can now moderate TrackBacks independently of comments. Before today, our moderation preference was set on both types of feedback at once. Now you can choose to moderate one, the other or both. Our recommended configuration for active blogs is moderating TrackBacks, requiring CAPTCHA for unauthenticated comments, and providing users the ability to sign in via TypeKey to comment.

• It’s now much easier to set those feedback preferences. Even though they’re the kind of preferences you want to set and forget, we still want to make the experience as straightforward as possible. The Weblog Configure tab now has a new “Feedback” page for setting your preferences for how your blog should handle inbound comments and TrackBacks.

Additionally, we just posted a new Widget that shows off a little bit of what's possible with the magical combination of Widgets and JavaScript. We've heard frequently that users want to have links to outside sites open in a new Window; this new widget does exactly that by installing a simple bit of JavaScript on your blog. We've got a few more of those in development, so stay tuned...

Posted by Michael Sippey at 04:46 PM | Permalink

05.15.2006

New Widgets for TypePad

Last week we introduced a baker's dozen of fresh new Widgets to the TypePad Widget Gallery, bringing our current Widget count to more than 45! Here's what's new:

• Newsvine adds live, up-to-the-second Newsvine news feeds from the Associated Press to the sidebar of your blog.
• Bitty Browser is a small browser for the sidebar of your blog. It can be customized to display any URL or links from Delicious, Digg, Flickr and more.
• Stylehive allows you to display pictures of your favorite products on your blog
• SiteMeter's widget allows you to easily install SiteMeter's visitor tracking code, to help you understand the traffic on your blog.
• Gada.be is metasearch engine that will allow your readers to more easily find (and subscribe to) RSS searches.
• WhoLinked shows other websites that are linking to your blog.
• JotSpot's Affiliate Program pays you for traffic that you send to JotSpot, the Application Wiki.
• BlogBar is a free search engine bar for searching within your site, or across the blogosphere or the web.
• Clipro allows you to create your own TV show from their video clips, photos and music, and then display it in the sidebar of your blog.
• Blog Barrel is a traffic networking system designed to give newer blogs a chance to gain exposure while expanding the audience of more popular blogs.
• Blog Tattoo is a simple but fun Widget that displays a "Kanji" (Japanese/Chinese character) at random on your blog.
• Andertoons lets you pick topic, click a button, and add a daily cartoon to your blog's sidebar.

And rounding out the lucky thirteen, a Widget that does more than just spruce up your blog...

• DonorsChoose is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. Their Widget can help you raise money for public school teachers and students.

If you haven't installed a Widget yet, check out the screencast to see just how easy it is, and then browse the Widget Gallery to find one (or more) that's right for your blog. Interested in developing Widgets? All of our developer documentation is online, and we're always on the lookout for more great Widgets to feature in our Gallery.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 03:55 PM | Permalink

05.04.2006

Skypecasts and TypePad

One of most rewarding things about blogging are the communities that form around them. Whether you're a culture blogger, a tech blogger, a television blogger or using your blog to promote your business, chances are you're familiar with the roster of readers who tend to comment on or link to your posts. We're always on the lookout for ways to help TypePad bloggers bring their communities to life -- which is why we're so excited about Skypecasts.

Skypecasts is a new community feature from Skype that's currently in "preview." With Skypecasts you can host live, moderated discussions with up to 100 participants, and all they need is the Skype software. Yesterday Skype launched their Skypecasts Directory, as well as a Widget that lets TypePad users promote upcoming Skypecasts (either their own or Skypecasts they're interested in) on their blog.

Ready to start talking with your readers? Hosting a Skypecast is easy...

1. Schedule your Skypecast. Got a topic for discussion? Got a time? Visit skypecasts.skype.com and schedule your Skypecast. It will be listed for anyone to discover and join.
2. Promote it on your blog. Once you’re listed in the Skypecasts directory, promote your Skypecast on your blog. Link to your listing directly in your post, or use the Skypecast Widget for TypePad.
3. Host your discussion. Connect using your Skype client to share your passion with your audience and have a bit of fun.

We'll be hosting our own Skypecasts soon -- look for an announcement here for the dates and times.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 02:37 PM | Permalink

05.03.2006

Word banning, and a word of thanks

The storm seems to have passed, and to mark a day of (relative) calm, this evening we introduced a new feature to TypePad: Word Banning.

You can now block comments and TrackBacks from reaching your blog if they contain words or phrases that you find offensive. For example: say that are you sick and tired of comments on your blog about Mary Poppins. Now you can simply ban the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and comments that contain that quite atrocious word will be stopped before they reach your blog.

Word and IP Address Banning in TypePad

Banning keywords is easy. We've combined word banning and IP banning into a single page in your Control Panel. IP banning continues to behave as it always has on TypePad -- adding an IP address to the list will block any comments or TrackBacks which are sent from that address.

Speaking of banning IP addresses... We want to thank everyone in the extended Six Apart community for all of the supportive emails, IMs and blog posts we've received in the last 24 hours. The team here appreciates it very, very much.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 10:45 PM | Permalink

04.18.2006

CAPTCHA on comments, and a round of bug fixes

This evening we added an oft-requested feature to TypePad, and cleaned up some of the bugs and annoyances that have been bothering you...and us!

First, the feature: you can now require unauthenticated commenters (who don't sign in through TypeKey) to pass a CAPTCHA test before their comment is posted to your blog. The CAPTCHA (a ""completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart") will help prevent automated robots from posting comment spam to your blog. We have more feedback management features in development to help you control the comments and TrackBacks on your blog, and will be rolling those out over the next month.

And here are some of the bug fixes I'm sure you'll be interested in learning about:

• We fixed an issue where our QuickPost screen wasn't automatically grabbing Amazon's product identifier (ISBN on books or ASIN on music). So you can now once again QuickPost to your reading and music lists with ease.
• We fixed an issue with our WYSIWYG editor and Internet Explorer where the editor was adding some extra (and unwanted!) style declarations to blockquote tags.
• Commenters can now use the "strike" tag in comments, if your weblog is configured to allow HTML in comments.
• We fixed a bug where the time displayed when comments are previewed was incorrect.
• We added support for the popular "m4v" format for videocasting. If you upload an m4v file into your post, your RSS 2.0 feed will now properly add that file as an enclosure. Go forth and videocast!

We have plenty of features and fixes in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more...

Posted by Michael Sippey at 11:22 PM | Permalink

03.29.2006

Introducing TypePad Widgets: Bling for your Blog

Ever wanted to spice up the sidebar of your blog with some content or functionality from another site? Today we just made that a whole lot easier. We’re excited to introduce TypePad Widgets, a new feature for TypePad that will bring dozens of features to your blog from the sites you're already using.

What’s a Widget, you ask? It could be a list of your most recent photos, or a topic-oriented search box, or a stats counter, or ads that help you make money, or a badge to help your users subscribe to your feed, or even a Flash game or a chat window. We call it "bling for your blog." We're launching with dozens of widgets from more than 30 partners, and more are on the way. Here are just a few of the things you can do with TypePad Widgets:

• Add your Technorati profile to your blog
• Share a custom search roll with Rollyo
• Publicize your FeedBurner feed
• Let your readers find their next job from Jobster, Indeed and Simply Hired
• Highlight your favorite lens from Squidoo to your blog
• Let your readers subscribe to your blog via email, thanks to FeedBlitz

Adding a Widget is simple. Just browse the TypePad Widget Gallery to choose the Widget that’s right for your blog, configure it at the Widget provider’s site, and then post it to your blog. We’ve added an easy way for you to choose the blog you want to add it to and preview it before it gets posted. To learn more, read our Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about TypePad Widgets, which has information about why we developed Widgets, what you can do with Widgets on your blogs, and more.

Interested in developing your own Widgets? Today we’re also launching an open program for Widget developers. The API is easy to use; if you’re interested in developing a Widget and want to learn more, get in touch.

We love bling, we love blogs. What’s not to love about bling on your blog? We’re excited about the launch of Widgets, and look forward to bringing you more...

Posted by Michael Sippey at 11:00 PM | Permalink

02.02.2006

TypePad Maintenance Activities in the coming week

In keeping with our continued efforts to strengthen performance and scalability of our service, we are planning two events in the next week that you should be aware of as they may impact your use of TypePad.

Scheduled Maintenance - this Saturday Night – Database Server Upgrade

Service Change – Tuesday, February 7th - Retiring old and temporary TypePad IP Addresses

Posted by Technical Support at 07:24 AM | Permalink

12.23.2005

Compensation for TypePad Outage

As some of you might know, last week on Thursday night and Friday morning TypePad suffered a severe hardware problem, causing blogs to be inaccessible for two hours and posting to be inaccessible for 16 hours. This was the longest outage in TypePad’s history, and given our performance problems in October I understand why at this point an apology might sound hollow. But the truth is, we are very sorry. The outage, of course, is inexcusable, and for us at Six Apart it was mortifying.

We know that our customers rely on us and expect to receive superior service and performance. Friday last week we didn’t provide that kind of experience, and as a result we will be crediting all active TypePad members with one free week of service. We will apply this to your account by extending your next payment due date by seven days. Customers billed monthly will receive this extension in January; customers billed on an annual basis will have the extension applied to their next billing date.

Over the past ten weeks we had been making great strides towards creating a faster and more reliable TypePad. While not yet perfect, November was better than October, and December was better than November…until last Friday.

While there is always a chance of outages on any web service, the fact is that when you are upgrading systems and moving data you create additional risk. The move to our new data center is paying off, but the frustrating reality is that these changes for long term stability have been painful. In fact this outage was the result of a failure in a device we were installing to provide extra redundancy in our disk storage system. I know it is not a comfort to those of you who were inconvenienced last week, but I’m sure you will appreciate the improved speed and reliability of TypePad.

We’ve also heard from some customers that it can be difficult to find information and announcements from us about TypePad maintenance activities and problems. We are working to improve that, and while we do please bookmark both this blog and status.sixapart.com, which are our two key communication channels.

I want to thank you all for the patience and loyalty so many of you have expressed to me. And I want to make it clear that we understand and share the frustration and anger some of you have been feeling. We are doing everything in our power to avoid ever having a problem on this scale again. That said, problems sometime will happen, but I promise;

1. We will continue to work hard to lower the risk of you being affected by any problems that may happen behind the scenes.

2. If you are affected by a problem that we were not able to protect you from, we will clearly and proactively communicate the problem and our estimated time to resolution.

3. We will work after the problem to analyze its cause, and whenever possible, eliminate the weakness that allowed it to affect you.

Finally, I always appreciate hearing from our customers, especially in times like these. Feel free to email me at Barakb@sixapart.com. I read all these mails and reply to those that need a reply.

This is a great time of the year and we know that next year will bring improved reliability and speed for TypePad. To all of our friends and customers from all of us at Six Apart, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year.

Posted by Barak Berkowitz at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

12.21.2005

Network Maintenance

On our status site we have announced a maintenance window for this evening (Wednesday, December 21st) between 10:00 pm PST and 11:00 pm PST, during which time the application and a subset of customer's blogs will be inaccessible for one period of approximately 10-15 minutes.

This maintenance window is the last step in our physical move from our old data center to our new data center. While over the past several weeks we've shifted most of our network traffic (for both the application and published blogs) to our new facility, tonight we'll be removing the final physical network connection at our old facility. While there are always risks in maintenance windows, the risk of this activity is very low, and we can fall back to our original network configuration very quickly if problems arise.

As always, we'll be posting updates to status.sixapart.com at the beginning and end of the maintenance window. We appreciate your patience as we complete the move to our new data center.

Update, 11:00 pm PST: The network maintenance was completed successfully.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 03:32 PM | Permalink

12.18.2005

TypePad Update: Data Restored

As we reach the end of the weekend, we want to follow up with more information about the activities over the past two days, and the current state of TypePad.

• Over the weekend we were able to recover the missing photos and files from the outage on Friday, and they have been successfully restored.
• On Saturday morning, we completed republishing user's weblogs, which brought blog posts, comments and TrackBacks up to date. Over the remainder of the weekend we proactively republished TypeLists, specific blogs, and photo albums as we restored files, and to resolve any individual customer issues.
• Since Friday afternoon, the TypePad application has been performing well according to internal metrics and Keynote, our independent monitoring service.

As always, our support team is standing by to help any of our customers who have any unresolved or related issues. Customers can file a help ticket by visiting the Help tab under the Control Panel inside TypePad.

We appreciate your patience as we restored your data. We will continue to use status.sixapart.com for more frequent updates regarding application availability and maintenance activities. Please also note that We will be posting more in-depth information about Friday's outage to Everything TypePad in the coming day.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 11:01 PM | Permalink

12.16.2005

TypePad is Back Up

The TypePad application is back up, and users can now log in. We've begun the process of republishing user's blogs. As we noted in our last post, if your blog is out of date and needs to be republished, you can do that yourself inside TypePad by visiting the Design tab for your weblog, and clicking the "Republish Weblog" button.

We want you to know that your blog data is safe. We have no reason to believe that any of your posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost. Over the weekend we will be restoring any photos or files you uploaded over the past several days. We will be providing updates throughout the weekend to status.sixapart.com, and will post any major updates to Everything TypePad.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 03:38 PM | Permalink

12.16.2005

Update on TypePad Issues

Here is an update on the current issues we're experiencing with TypePad.

• Most importantly, we want you to know that your blog data is safe. We have no reason to believe that any of your posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost.
• We are currently working to restore access to TypePad. We expect users to be able to log in to the application and post to their blogs later this afternoon Pacific time.
• When TypePad returns, your published weblog will be in a state from a recent snapshot, taken a few days ago.

Over the next few days we will be taking two steps to bring your weblog fully up to date.

• First, we will be proactively republishing weblogs so that they contain the most recent posts, comments and TrackBacks. However, when you log in to TypePad, you should feel free to update your blog yourself, if our process has yet to reach your site. You can do that by visiting the Design tab for your weblog, and clicking the "Republish Weblog" button.
• Second, we will be restoring photos and files that you've uploaded to TypePad this week. To reiterate, we have no reason to believe that any of your photos or files have been lost, and expect to have them restored to your blog no later than the end of the weekend.

We appreciate your patience as we work through these issues. We will be posting updates to status.sixapart.com, and will post major news to Everything TypePad.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 02:16 PM | Permalink

12.12.2005

Introducing Support Posts!

Over the next week, we'll be featuring a set of posts that will introduce some great features of TypePad, as well as giving you a chance to meet the TypePad Technical Services team. This series is being presented along with the launch of our new and improved Knowledge Base at support.typepad.com. This new KB has more search options and a lot of your feature requests about our documentation have been incorporated. Each post has links to the new documentation, in order to give you an idea of things you'll find in the Knowledge Base.

Each of the tips was written by a member of the TypePad support team and will serve as an introduction to a feature or a tutorial on how to work with TypePad. Every day, we get a lot of requests from subscribers about things they would like to do, and these posts cover some of the more frequently inquired about areas.

So have fun with the tips -- we enjoyed putting them together for you!

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The series so far features these articles:

• Brenna on "Photo Albums are Easy and Fun!"
• Carla on "Wide Variety of Themes available!"
• Melissa on "Adding Sidebar Content with TypeLists"
• Kymberlie on "About Pages for Sharing Info"
• Laura on "Adding a Personalized Icon to your Weblog">
• Colleen on "Moblogging Options"
• Kristine on "Dressing Up Your Weblog with a Banner Image"

Posted by Technical Support at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

12.09.2005

Three New Features

We rolled three new features into TypePad this week, just in time for the holidays.

Holiday Themes
Continuing our annual tradition, we've posted three new holiday themes. This year they're available as both weblog and photo album themes. To dress up your blog for the holidays, click on "Change Theme" on the Design tab. The new themes are in the "Special Interest" category; pick the one you like, click "Save Changes" and you're done!

New Searchable Knowledge Base
We're excited to launch a new Knowledge Base that will help you find answers to your questions about TypePad and how to make your blog the best it can be. Our Support team has done a fantastic job of migrating our old Help system into the new Knowledge Base, and we encourage you to give it a spin (and bookmark it!) at support.typepad.com.

Delete as Junk
Over the past few months, we've made a number of enhancements to the way we analyze comments and TrackBacks as they're posted, with the goal of filtering spam before it ever reaches your blog. We know, however, that our tests aren't perfect and we can learn more about comment and TrackBack spam from our user community. To do that, we've added new action buttons to the comment and TrackBack listing screens that let you "Delete as Junk" any piece of feedback that you want to report to TypePad as spam. Over time we'll use this information to evolve more powerful spam-fighting tools.

From all of us on the TypePad team, here's to a well-decorated, well-informed and junk-free holiday season!

Posted by Michael Sippey at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

12.05.2005

Video Blogging on TypePad

We’re excited to announce two partnerships with companies that are making it easy to add video to your TypePad blog: VideoEgg and Serious Magic. What’s great about these two products is that they provide two very different ways of video blogging, but they’re both great fits with TypePad.

When VideoEgg debuted at Demo Fall 2005 and won a DEMOgod award (alongside Mena's mom), we knew we had to figure out a way to connect their VideoEgg Publisher with TypePad. The Publisher is a web-based plugin that makes it simple for users to capture, edit, encode and post digital video. VideoEgg has been kind enough to make a preview version of VideoEgg Publisher available to TypePad users free of charge, at typepad.videoegg.com. From their site you can log in to your TypePad account and use VideoEgg to post a short video to your blog. Use it to share a short movie of your friends, your kids, your coworkers. You can learn more about how TypePad and VideoEgg work together in the FAQ that VideoEgg has put together.

Serious Magic's Vlog It is a Windows application that makes it easy to produce professional newscaster-style video blog posts. You can combine your own clips, photos and sound effects with Vlog It’s titles, graphics and transitions to create your own personal newscast or documentary without knowing how to use complex video editing software. TypePad users can download a special edition of Vlog It that provides free video hosting and an easy way to post videos to your blog.

We love products that make it easy to add rich, engaging content to your blog. Vlog It and the VideoEgg Publisher are two tools that are making video blogging easy and fun. We're happy they're working with TypePad, and we're looking forward to seeing what you do with them!

Posted by Michael Sippey at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

11.14.2005

Update on and compensation for TypePad performance

Update on and compensation for TypePad's performance

Two weeks ago I posted about the problems that some of our users experienced last month and what we were doing to fix them. Today I want to tell you about the work we've done and our plans to compensate our customers for the inconvenience and frustration we may have caused.

The progress we've made

Over the last two weeks we have made great strides. As we recently posted on Mena's Corner, we have made a number of significant technical changes. We have upgraded hardware throughout the service, we are about to finish installation of a new enterprise-grade data storage device and the move to our new data center is nearly complete. All of this has led to improved performance.

We are not yet perfect. One incident on Tuesday November 8th between approximately 9:00 am and noon Pacific Time caused limited access to the TypePad application. Even with that problem the performance of TypePad, as reported by our customers, our internal systems and the independent Keynote monitoring service, has improved greatly over the last 12 days.

While we are not done with our work, and there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe that the worst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on how we can make these problems up to our customers.

Compensation for this less than stellar performance

Our customers pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. Those who use the service on weekdays between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time may have experienced one or even many periods when they had problems with TypePad's speed and responsiveness. Those who use the service at other times may not have experienced any problems at all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is to allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.

By default, all currently active TypePad customers will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don't have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so earlier today we emailed all of our active customers on TypePad, and gave you the opportunity to choose from the following options:

• While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
  Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
  Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
  Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

• I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
  Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

If you are a current, active TypePad customer and you did not receive this email, or you had problems selecting your preferred choice, please email us at choice@sixapart.com. Please include your username, your TypePad domain name (e.g. myblog.typepad.com or myblog.blogs.com) and your preferred amount of compensation.

The future

I must say that one of the most rewarding aspects of these last three frustrating weeks have been the emails I have received from many of you. A large number of the messages I received were very kind and supportive, and some of you were understandably angry, but you all expressed that you just wanted the service you loved back. Rest assured that we are working night and day to do just that and more.

We are committed to making the service faster and more reliable than it has ever been. With our new data center we now have room to add the capacity we will need to continue our growth while improving performance and adding often requested features.

We will soon roll out a new release of TypePad that will include more controls for comment and TrackBack spam as well more performance improvements. By year end we will do even more to improve TypePad and add the features you have asked for. We are excited to get back to building a great product for you.

Thank you for your patience over the past several weeks and I hope you accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience we may have caused you.

Posted by Barak Berkowitz at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.28.2005

To our customers

I wanted to add some detail to Mena and Ben's post yesterday and to give you additional insight into what we are doing to fix the current problems and how we got here.

How did we get to this place?

For over a year we have been growing the TypePad service and adding capacity as needed. This growth has been extraordinary, and we are now serving ten times the traffic we were serving a year ago. About 3 months ago we learned that the data center we were in had no more available power (not space, but power) with no option to obtain more. After some evaluation of options we decided that we needed to go through the process of physically moving out of that data center. And while we would need to grow capacity, we had to stay within the limits of the power available in our current facility.

At this point a race began to procure a new data center, buy more equipment and move data and then servers to the new facility.

We did a search for a facility that had the capacity for us to avoid getting into this situation again. We then leased space, numerous new servers and other equipment, added ten times the bandwidth of the old facility, got a dedicated data connection between the old and new facility and began to build out new cabinets to house the servers. Two weeks ago we began the move. Due to even more rapid growth than expected in the use of TypePad, we needed the capacity a week earlier than that. So basically we lost the race to move and the excess load on the servers in the old data center started to cause failures in systems that have created poor service for you and, unfortunately, further slowed the move.

The engineering and operations team have been working around the clock to fix problems as they arise, while continuing the move to the new data center and get the new equipment in place and your data over to the new machines.

So where are we now?

Over the last two days we have made significant progress in relieving the stress on the servers in the old data center and completing the move. Below is a chart presenting specific improvements scheduled over the next few days and over the next few weeks. Many of these items were already mentioned in the post yesterday but I want to be sure you have all the data you need to understand the process.

	Over the Next Few Days	Over the Next Few Weeks
Storage	Add 2 Terabytes of additional data storage	Add new high-performance network storage system with over 10TB of capacity
Database	Implement code improvements making the database more efficient on its current hardware	Move to new high end database servers
Bandwidth	5X more available than last week	Double the bandwidth again (10X over today!)
Application	Introduce less database intensive logic to calculate stats	Continue to make the application faster and more efficient
Power	Enough power for the next 6 months of growth	Power for the next year
Space	Space to accommodate TypePad for the next year	Options on another year's worth of space
Load balancing	Ten times the bandwidth of today	Double again
Backups	2 tier backups today	3 tier backup solution

As you can see a great deal of activity will be happening in the next few days. This Saturday night between the hours of 9PM – midnight PDT, we have scheduled downtime to complete some of these activities. Specific details are posted on our status page.

By the end of next week, we hope to have all this behind us and to be back to providing you the superior service you have come to expect from TypePad. We ask for a little bit more patience until that time. We all can’t wait to get back to the situation where our customers are delighted with our service and happy to recommend it to their friends. Until that time please accept our sincere apologies and thanks for your patience.

Barak Berkowitz
Chairman and CEO Six Apart
The providers of TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal

Posted by Barak Berkowitz at 01:05 PM | Permalink

10.10.2005

TypePad Turns Two!

We're celebrating two years of TypePad this month! And what better way to celebrate its birthday than to toast ten special things you may not know you can do with TypePad.

1. Share feeds. Have a favorite news source or blog you'd love to promote? Want to share the links you keep on del.icio.us, or even the posts from another one of your blogs on TypePad? You can add any RSS or Atom feed to the sidebar of your blog, and TypePad will keep it up to date for your readers.

2. Be present. Let your readers see if you’re online and available on AIM, Yahoo IM, or ICQ, right in the sidebar of your blog.

3. Shout it out. Podcasting in TypePad is as easy as uploading your MP3 or AAC file into a new post. TypePad automatically creates an RSS 2.0 feed, which you can share on the sidebar of your blog.

4. Get paid. TypePad makes it easy to earn a little extra cash from your blog, thanks to integrated text ads. With just a few clicks, Pro users can add contextual ads to the sidebar of their blog and start turning posts into cash.

5. Collect tips. Ads aren’t your thing? Then let your readers say "thanks" by adding a PayPal-powered donation button to your blog. You can use those funds to pay for your TypePad subscription, or for that new iPod Nano you've been coveting.

6. Express yourself. TypePad features more than 35 professionally designed themes that you can apply to your blog with a simple point and click. There are even special themes for weddings, food, travel, knitting and babies.

7. Deck it out. Once you’ve picked a theme, deck out your blog with badges, blogrolls and bling. TypeLists let you share lists of your friends, your favorite sites, the books you’re reading or the music you're listening to. And we've just added a “Notes�? TypeList, which lets you copy and paste in free-form HTML for your favorite badges, whether it’s a Red Cross donation button or a FeedBurner FeedCount graphic.

8. Apply some feng shui. Once you’ve picked your perfect mix of blog bling, you can use TypePad's drag and drop design tools to customize the layout of your blog. Find that perfect balance of links, photos, lists and posts.

9. Update from the road. TypePad has powerful tools for moblogging. We give you a secret email address, you give us your pictures and posts from your phone, and we'll automatically post them to your blog or photo album. Or, use Nokia’s Lifeblog and easily post photos, videos, MMS and SMS messages from your Nokia Series 60 phone.

10. Protect from prying eyes. You don’t have to go public with your blog. Use TypePad's password protection feature to keep a private blog or photo album for your family, your work group, or even just for yourself.

Happy birthday, TypePad! We’re proud of what you’ve been able to accomplish in your short life, and look forward to what’s coming next.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 08:41 PM | Permalink

09.21.2005

Keep in touch by giving the gift of blogging

We had several college interns in the Six Apart offices this summer. While we were very sorry to see each of them head back to school last month, it’s also been great keeping up with them through their blogs. One of our interns went to study in Rome for a year, and we’ve been enjoying her updates and commentary on both Italian food and men. Apparently, a good way to learn Italian is to find a good-looking man who doesn’t speak too much English. One Six Apart employee has a six month old niece who is so smart she keeps a blog of all of her activities several times a week. Teething, trying solid food for the first time, and Daddy and Me swimming classes are just some of the topics she covers. While the rest of the world may not be taken with her daily activities, her family members located around the world find each of her posts inexplicably fascinating. There are also a number of us at Six Apart who have moved across the country to join the company, and our friends and family enjoy keeping up with our new lives via our blogs.

If you’ve been wishing you could hear more from your favorite teenager who just went off to college, or your old college friend who just had a baby, or your neighbors who just moved to Australia for sabbatical, we’ve put together some special TypePad pricing that can satisfy your need for more information AND make you look like the considerate, generous person that you are.

If you are already a TypePad customer, you can get a free TypePad subscription (at the same level) to give as a gift by renewing your subscription for an additional year. Or, if you just want to buy a subscription for a special person, annual subscription prices for our TypePad Basic, Plus and Pro services are now reduced to just $39, $69, and $99 respectively, allowing you to save up to 55% off a yearly subscription. (If you are not a TypePad customer yet, sign up here.)

We hope that you and the special people you want to stay in touch with enjoy keeping up through your TypePad blogs as much as we've enjoyed it.

Continue reading “Keep in touch by giving the gift of blogging”

Posted by Deborah Schultz at 09:15 AM | Permalink

09.01.2005

How your blog can help victims of Hurricane Katrina

Ever since Monday, I have been touched by the amount of support shown by my fellow co-workers to those of us here at Six Apart who have family and friends living in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. I myself have over 20 relatives who live in the city of New Orleans, including my parents, 5 aunts and uncles, 3 cousins, and a large extended family. Jay Allen has family in New Orleans as well, and many more of us have friends there. We suspect that we here at Six Apart are not unlike many of you - we all have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, and are wondering, "what can we possibly do to help?"

Believe it or not, one of the best things you can do is also the easiest: send money, and encourage others to do so as well. It only takes a moment to add one of the following badges to your weblog:

In an area where people have no food, no potable water, no electrity, no shelter, and in many cases: nothing at all, a little bit can go a long way.

Continue reading “How your blog can help victims of Hurricane Katrina”

Posted by Byrne Reese at 06:14 PM | Permalink

08.18.2005

Easier sidebar editing, full Podcasting support , XML Feeds and more

As of today, it is even easier for you to share and publish interesting content on your blog. Almost all of the new features are the result of direct requests from customers over the past few months; they're also enhancements that the TypePad development team – avid bloggers, all – have wanted themselves. Here is a brief overview of the new features we will be introducing during the course of this week. However, don't feel you have to wait for us to illuminate the new features - go ahead and start exploring now!

Continue reading “Easier sidebar editing, full Podcasting support , XML Feeds and more”

Posted by Deborah Schultz at 10:19 AM | Permalink

07.29.2005

It’s the "little-big" things…

Every time we add new features to TypePad we eagerly await your response, and we are often pleasantly surprised by what you get enthusiastic about. With the latest release your greatest response was to a feature that was simple for us but has a big impact for you: increased storage and bandwidth.

As we are hitting peak vacation season, we wanted to make sure you were aware that all TypePad customers now have almost double their storage and bandwidth at no additional cost. So, go ahead and upload those vacation photos and share them with your friends and family – you’ve got plenty of room.

Tip: To see your current bandwidth and storage limits, along with current bandwidth and storage totals, visit the Account Overview page on your Control Panel.

Posted by Byrne Reese at 03:35 PM | Permalink

07.09.2005

Thanks for Your Patience

It would be an understatement to say that we here at Six Apart have had a busy week following last weekend’s push of all the new features in TypePad. While we were very excited about how feature-packed this new release is, we were less-than-pleased with the amount of service degradation that resulted because of some code hiccups.

You can rest assured knowing that the staff here have been working around the clock monitoring TypePad’s performance and resolving performance issues. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced including the various display bugs that cropped up. This includes the paragraph spacing, footer and TypeList item display quirks that have now been resolved.

Lastly, we realize that we could have done a much better job giving you an advanced warning about the sort of behavior that was to be expected with the release (including the rebuilding of your weblog). We’ve learned from this experience and will be giving you more than ample notice about upcoming releases.

Remember, we also have our status site to help you keep track of site maintenance.

Your suggestions and effort in helping us troubleshoot the issues has been greatly appreciated and we hope that you enjoy the new features — which are rather awesome. Keep an eye out for posts in the future that will tell you how to best utilize the new features.

Posted by Mena Trott at 07:24 PM | Permalink

07.01.2005

New Design Tools, More Storage, More Bandwidth

Over the past few weeks we have posted about the upcoming enhancements to the Design and Community Management features on TypePad. We are very excited to release these new enhancements today.

What you haven’t yet heard about are the many new enhancements and features we have sprinkled throughout the service. Most of these features are a direct result of your input and requests, and some are features we just thought you’d think are fun. (Doubling storage and bandwidth are two examples). We think your weblogging experience is going to greatly benefit from these enhancements, so enjoy! Here’s the list:

New Features

• Increased bandwidth limits and storage limits for everyone! All users at all service levels now have their storage and bandwidth limits effectively doubled. That’s right - doubled! So go ahead upload those photos. There’s plenty of room.

• New Instant Message status side bar – With the simple click of a button you can show your IM status in your sidebar content. Now your AOL buddies and Yahoo friends can see what you are up to.

Continue reading “New Design Tools, More Storage, More Bandwidth”

Posted by Deborah Schultz at 05:51 PM | Permalink

06.30.2005

Get ready for some great new features

This Friday we will begin some maintenance work on TypePad in preparation for launching the new design and community management features we've been writing about. At 5PM PST, TypePad will be taken offline for about two hours. Then over the course of the weekend we will begin to rebuild everyone's weblog in order to ensure that everyone's published weblog is taking advantage of the latest features and stylesheet enhancements (users of advanced template sets excluded). During this period you should not encounter any performance degradation, but if you notice anything that seems amiss our TypePad support team will be there to assist and respond.

The TypePad team suggests that since this is a holiday weekend, you call it a day at 5PM, head to your local watering hole and raise a glass to webloggers everywhere. When you return to write about your wonderful night out, or the great Fourth of July weekend you had, you will be greeted with a slew of new features.

We hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and happy hour, and we can't wait to show you what we added to TypePad.

Update: Only the TypePad application will be affected by this outage. Published weblogs will remain available during this time period. (7/1/2005)

Posted by Byrne Reese at 08:44 AM | Permalink

06.24.2005

TypePad in China

We've become aware that all TypePad sites are currently being blocked in China, similar to the block put in place last year. We discovered the blocking in the same way that most of our TypePad members did, by hearing about it from readers in China.

Until access is restored, the only recommendations we can make for workarounds is to use any web proxies which are available for routing requests to TypePad through another site. In addition, third-party services for processing syndication feeds aren't currently being blocked, so if you're using another service to enhance your TypePad-published XML feed, it's likely the feed will still be available to audiences in China.

To be clear, the availability of TypePad-powered sites in China isn't something we have control over, but we do hope that full access is restored quickly, as it was last year.

Posted by Anil Dash at 10:40 PM | Permalink

06.21.2005

A penny for your thoughts?

A significant evolution in weblogging has been the relationship between blogger-created content and contextual advertising. Unobtrusive contextual ads have become a large component in weblogging as bloggers realize it's often a good way to subsidize their online passion (we're talking weblogging, here).

We've been working on a way that allows our subscribers to take advantage of the opportunities of text-based advertising. Starting today, TypePad Pro users can now easily set-up and integrate text ads directly into their weblogs, track their earnings with TypePad and use the money to pay for their subscription.

Setting up contextual advertising on your weblogs is easy. You don't need to know HTML or how to edit your templates. You have full control over the colors and configuration of your ads. If you choose the "easy setup" option, you can even have TypePad configure the ads for you. The new earnings tab makes it simple to view your earnings and track ad impressions and clicks.

The money you earn will be applied to your subscription fees. Ninety days after you join the program any money left in your account can be transferred to a PayPal account or left in your earnings account to continue paying for your TypePad subscription.

We think the ability for our subscribers to easily (you won't have to independently apply for an account) set up text ads on their weblogs is indicative in our effort to make TypePad Pro the service of choice for dedicated bloggers. Later this summer, we will add additional features that will expand TypePad Pro users' ability to earn and track revenues.

So, if you're a TypePad Pro subscriber, be sure to check out this new feature!

Posted by Byrne Reese at 08:00 AM | Permalink

06.10.2005

Upcoming Enhancements: New designs and better design tools

As anyone who has ever set-up a weblog knows, finding the right design for your weblog is virtually as important as finding your personal voice: both play an essential role in expressing your personality to your readers. While we'll leave it to you to find your voice, we have recently devoted significant energy into enhancing the experience you have designing and customizing your weblog. Whether you're a beginning user just starting to build your first weblog, or an experienced user well versed in CSS, you'll soon find it easier than ever to create a look that is uniquely you.

Continue reading “Upcoming Enhancements: New designs and better design tools”

Posted by Byrne Reese at 10:21 AM | Permalink

05.31.2005

Upcoming Enhancements: Comment and TrackBack Management

As you can probably imagine, we spend an awful lot of time at Six Apart explaining to the non-blogging world what, exactly, a weblog is. People often ask how weblogs are different from home pages on the one hand and content management systems on the other. A key feature we use to explain the differences is the feedback loop that happens with weblogs through comments and TrackBacks.

Continue reading “Upcoming Enhancements: Comment and TrackBack Management”

Posted by Michael Sippey at 09:43 AM | Permalink

03.29.2005

It's not just what you say, it's how you say it

If you subscribe to comment notifications on your TypePad weblog you may have noticed that we have recently updated the email you receive when one of your readers posts a comment. One of the things you will probably notice is that the email is now in HTML, as are virtually all of the emails TypePad now sends to its users. Of course, some of you also noticed a small oversight on our part to provide a quick and easy link to the post the comment was posted to. That oversight has been fixed – thanks goes out to those intrepid TypePad users who were kind enough to point that out to us.
Want to see what these new e-mails look like? First, subscribe to new comment notifications, and then post a comment on one of your TypePad weblogs. Or better yet, get a friend to post a comment on your weblog and wait and see. The email only takes a few moments to arrive.
Come on, you really thought we were going to show you a screenshot? What fun would that be? By all means: go forth and comment!

Continue reading “It's not just what you say, it's how you say it”

Posted by Byrne Reese at 05:26 PM | Permalink

02.15.2005

Welcome changes

This week we are pleased to see the release of a new Six Apart website, a project that brought with it many highly desired changes, both to our corporate website, but also to TypePad.

First, for those out there who still don’t know what a weblog is, those of you reading this excluded of course, we asked some of our most popular webloggers to help us come up with a definition for the term using their own words in a new section called "What's a weblog?"

We have also worked to provide a richer and more useful TypePad login and welcome screen to give users a better sense of what's happening within the TypePad universe. Beyond simply: what weblogs have been updated recently, users will now be treated to an additional set of featured weblogs that we feel highlight the "best of breed" for their uniqueness, their design, their community, or their content. And finally, once you login, a new welcome page will update you with pertinent news about your account and provide you with a list of your TypePad weblogs so that you are able to more quickly get to the business at hand: weblogging.

Posted by Byrne Reese at 07:58 AM | Permalink

01.19.2005

Mixed Media Templates Get an Upgrade!

It has been busy at Six Apart, and while we had to deal with a little hiccup this past week, we wouldn't want the week to go by without some good news to report as well. Last night we released some major enhancements to Dave Shea's mixed media layouts making them less fragile, and substantially more compatible with all of the most popular web browsers available.

If you have never seen these special weblog layouts, and especially if you moblog or publish a lot of photos then you most certainly should check them out, as our mixed media layouts are ideal for displaying images and other multimedia content. If you need assistance updating your weblog with the new layouts, our help system has a great article to help you.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot... In our never-ending War on Comment Spam we rolled out a relatively minor change to our service that we expect to have a significant impact on the degree of comment spam our users are subjected to. Working with a number of thought leaders in the weblogging community, we are the first hosted weblogging solution to deploy the rel="nofollow" attribute in all of our comments and trackbacks. But perhaps more importantly, we have deployed this feature to the largest number of webloggers to date. To learn more about how a little change to your HTML could have a dramatic impact on comment spam, check out our post on Six Log.

Posted by Byrne Reese at 07:23 AM | Permalink

12.20.2004

Add Your Amazon Wish List to Your TypePad Weblog

In the spirit of the season, today we added a new feature to TypePad:  you can now share your Amazon Wish List with your readers and friends. Through the combined magic of TypePad and Amazon, with a few clicks you can have a selection of items from your Wish List appear in the sidebar of your weblog.  There’s no need to hunt down your cryptic thirteen digit Amazon Wish List identifer -- all you need is the email address that you've associated with your Wish List, and TypePad does all the work.

Continue reading “Add Your Amazon Wish List to Your TypePad Weblog”

Posted by Michael Sippey at 05:55 PM | Permalink

12.03.2004

Buy One Weblog, and Get One Free

Following our announcement last week, the TypePad team at Six Apart is happy to announce the release of our 2004 Holiday Promotions. Under the Buy One Get One Free promotion, subscribers who renew or upgrade their TypePad account for up to one year will also receive a one year subscription at the same level to give as a gift. Under the Give the Gift of TypePad promotion, existing TypePad subscribers are free to buy as many TypePad subscriptions as they wish at great holiday prices. One year subscriptions start at just $39; that's just $3.25 per month! They make great gifts for the kiddies... and grand-ma too.

To learn more about these special promotions, read our frequently asked questions.

Continue reading “Buy One Weblog, and Get One Free”

Posted by Byrne Reese at 03:43 PM | Permalink

12.01.2004

Winter Themed Photo Album Templates Are Here!

We here at TypePad constantly seek to improve upon and add to our selection of design templates, and today we are happy to announce a new series of winter themed photo-album styles (Candy Cane, Elegant, Snowman, and Winter Wonderland). These new designs are perfect for the season, and are an excellent way to display your favorite snapshots from family gatherings, gift-opening extravaganzas, and ski trips.

To select one of the new templates, in Design, click on the "Style" link and choose a template from the pull-down menu. When you've found the one you like, click "Save Changes" and TypePad will apply the design to your album automatically.

Posted by Byrne Reese at 09:29 AM | Permalink

11.25.2004

Avoid the Malls: Give the Gift of a TypePad

For those of you not wanting to venture off into the mad post-Thanksgiving Holiday Shopping sprees in your local stores and malls, Six Apart has the perfect excuse for you to stay home, feast on Thanksgiving Day left-overs, and still get all of your holiday shopping done. Starting next week, TypePad customers will be able to visit TypePad.com and purchase “the gift of a TypePad�? for anyone on their holiday shopping list at a special holiday promotional price. An annual subscription of our TypePad Basic, Plus and Pro services will be reduced to just $39, $69, and $99 respectively, allowing you to save up to 55% off a yearly subscription to be given as a gift to anyone you know.

But wait! That’s not all. For a limited time, TypePad customers can get a free TypePad subscription to give as a gift this season. Simply renew your subscription to TypePad on an annual basis, and you will receive a free yearly subscription (at the same level) to give to someone on your holiday shopping list this season.

We expect our weblogs to be flying off warehouse shelves, so after your Thanksgiving weekend run, don’t walk, to your computer in the other room and visit TypePad.com and take part in these special promotional offers… while supplies last!

Posted by Mena Trott at 04:46 AM | Permalink

11.18.2004

New Photo Album Templates and Other Fixes

Today we've posted more than a dozen new photo album styles, including two new seasonal designs (Autumn Leaves and Autumn Harvest), designs that are perfect for showing off the new baby in the house (available in both blue and pink themes, of course), and some color scheme additions to our classic styles.  To explore the new styles and apply them to your photo album, simply click on the style link in "Design" and choose the style from the pull-down menu. When you've found the one you like, press "Save Changes" and TypePad will apply the new album design automatically.

Additionally, based on feedback from members we've made a few small enhancements and squashed some minor bugs.

Continue reading “New Photo Album Templates and Other Fixes”

Posted by Michael Sippey at 01:53 PM | Permalink

11.04.2004

Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added two new features to TypePad:

• Rich text editing, aka “WYSIWYG�? (What You See is What You Get); and an
• Integrated spell checker.

One of our most important goals with TypePad is to make it easy and fun for you to add new content to your weblog. While some folks might enjoy writing "raw" HTML, we’ve been using rich text editing around the office for the last few weeks, and have found that it’s easier to write, review and edit posts before publishing them to our weblogs.

If you are just discovering TypePad sign-up for our free trial and see how fast and easy it is to create and maintain a professional looking weblog.

Continue reading “Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad”

Posted by Michael Sippey at 03:19 PM | Permalink

10.29.2004

New Halloween Photo Album Styles

Two years in a row make it a TypePad tradition!

Just in time for this weekend's trick-or-treaters, we've posted two new Halloween-themed photo album styles for TypePad users to choose when customizing their photo albums. To apply either Halloween Witches or Halloween Pumpkins to your album of frightening photos, simply click on the style link in "Design" and choose the style from the pull-down menu. Press "Save Changes" and TypePad will apply the new album design automatically.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 08:12 PM | Permalink

09.24.2004

File Manager Enhancements and Other Fixes

This week we released an enhancement to the TypePad File Manager, and squashed a few minor bugs in different parts of the application.

Based on feedback from subscribers, we've made some enhancements to the TypePad File Manager, making it easier for you to upload and manage the extra content you're including in your TypePad weblog.

• You can now create new folders through the file manager. Before you were only able to upload files into existing folders; TypePad now allows you to create and name new folders to better organize your content and assets.
• We've made it easier to delete files in the file manager. You can now "check all" items with one click for bulk deletion, and also delete empty folders.
• We've added a quick and easy way for you to copy and paste a link to any item you've uploaded in the file manager. Just click on the link icon in the file listing, and TypePad will popup a window with a readymade link for you to insert into a weblog post.

One of the bugs we fixed corrects the issue where guest authors weren't able to set their own image display preferences when inserting images into posts. Guest authors can now choose to either accept the weblog's default settings for image display, or set a custom thumbnail size, text wrapping behavior and link behavior for that post.

Posted by Michael Sippey at 04:35 PM | Permalink

07.01.2004

Fighting Comment/Trackback Spam

Updated - We changed Typepad in a number of ways to help deal with Comment Spam. Many of you have recently found many unwanted messages on your blog posts. Dealing with these annoying and often offensive messages has become a major problem.

Continue reading “Fighting Comment/Trackback Spam”

Posted by Paul Lindner at 04:34 PM | Permalink

06.11.2004

Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004

To fix some routing issues that have caused slowness in the "Add me to your TypePad People List" feature, we're scheduling some network maintenance for the early morning of Saturday, June 12, 2004, from 12:00am to 2:00am Pacific time. During at least part of that time, TypePad-powered sites and TypePad itself will be down for maintenance. It's quite likely that the actual downtime will be much shorter, but we want to allow for any issues that may arise. Thanks for your patience!

Update, 1am: completed.

Update, 5:30am: we experienced some unscheduled downtime from about 3:30am-5:15am Pacific time on Saturday, June 12, 2004, which we believe to be tangentially related to the network maintenance above. We've now brought all of the systems back up, and we'll be monitoring the service closely for any problems.

Posted by Mena Trott at 08:35 AM | Permalink

05.26.2004

Scheduled Downtime May 29, 2004

We apologize for the intermittent slow performance of TypePad web sites over the past 2-3 days. We're having some problems with our storage servers, so we're scheduling a hardware upgrade for the early morning of Saturday, May 29, 2004, from 12:00am to 2:00am Pacific time. During that time, TypePad-powered sites and TypePad itself will be down for maintenance. Thanks for your patience!

Update: completed.

Posted by Mena Trott at 01:59 PM | Permalink

05.06.2004

TypePad Spain Launches

As promised in our announcement about TypePad France, we have now launched TypePad Spain. We'll be sending our current TypePad (US) subscribers located in Spain a message about how to take advantage of this localized service. If you're in Europe and are interested in using TypePad France or TypePad Spain and don't receive an email, please open a help ticket and we'll explain more about this process.

Posted by Mena Trott at 02:10 PM | Permalink

04.26.2004

TypePad France

We're pleased to announce the launch of TypePad France. Thanks to the Ublog team (our exclusive agents in Europe) for helping us reach this milestone. We'll be adding additional localized functionality in the near future -- including recently updated lists limited to our French weblogs and photo albums. If you're a Francophone, sign up today.

We'll be launching Spanish next week, with other countries and languages to follow soon after.

Posted by Mena Trott at 02:15 PM | Permalink

04.22.2004

File Manager, Moblogging for Basic and Improvements

We've introduced a number of new features to TypePad tonight. In particular, one of them, the File Manager, is a feature that will please many TypePad users.

We've also unveiled a new logo for TypePad, which we're very excited about! After months of the old logo (always intended to be temporary), it's refreshing to see the new logo, based on a lily pad, and which we see as emblematic of the community of subscribers that has been built around TypePad.

In the coming months, we're planning to roll out additional interface changes to make TypePad easier to use and more powerful and these new features and changes are the first steps in that direction.

Continue reading “File Manager, Moblogging for Basic and Improvements”

Posted by Mena Trott at 06:57 PM | Permalink

03.30.2004

China and TypePad

We have heard reports from some Chinese TypePad users that they can not access their public weblogs but can access the TypePad application. We've heard from some weblog readers in China that they are able to access TypePad weblogs.

We are pretty confident that there is not a technical reason on our end for the problems some Chinese users are having accessing their sites.

Frankly, because we are not in China, we can't be 100% sure of the exact cause and effects of the situation and to what degree our customers are being affected. I can say that we are trying to get to the bottom of this situation and trouble-shoot why some users aren't able to access their sites.

Now, if you're a TypePad user in China and are experiencing a problem accessing your site (or are in China are not having problems), please open a help ticket. Right now we don't have a definitive answer on what's going on, but it would help to know where exactly in China you're located. It may, in fact, be a regional issue.

Posted by Mena Trott at 10:58 PM | Permalink

03.14.2004

Network Issues and Page Loads

Some TypePad subscribers are having trouble loading certain pages on TypePad-powered web sites. We don't know yet if this is a network problem outside of our own servers or something inside of our network, but our engineers are working hard to troubleshoot the problem.

If you're having a problem loading your TypePad web site, please fill out a Help Ticket, and we'll get in touch with you about providing a trace of your network path to ours. We've found that many users having trouble accessing sites tend to be on similar networks, so more network data would be helpful.

Update: As of March 15, 2004 11:00am Pacific time the problem has been solved. It turns out that it was a routing problem at Internap, our network provider, affecting only a certain percentage of network connections.

Thanks to all TypePad subscribers and their visitors for their patience! We'll be adding a network connection from another provider to add redundancy in the future.

Posted by Mena Trott at 12:36 AM | Permalink

03.05.2004

Scheduled Downtime (March 6, 2004)

TypePad will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance on Saturday, March 6, 2004, from 12:00am to 12:30am Pacific time. We'll be installing more memory in our storage servers as part of our efforts to further improve their performance; we apologize for the inconvenience.

Posted by Mena Trott at 11:25 AM | Permalink

03.03.2004

Performance Fixes

We've said it before, but this time we mean it: we have instituted a solid fix for the slow performance you've been seeing on TypePad-powered web sites.

A short history of the website sluggishness, and what we've done to fix it, follows.

Continue reading “Performance Fixes”

Posted by Mena Trott at 04:00 PM | Permalink

03.02.2004

Intermittent Sluggishness

We are aware that TypePad is again being intermittently slow in serving pages.

We have a team working on diagnosing and resolving these issues right now and we expect to have an action plan that we'll be communicating to our users shortly. As I said previously, any performance issues are just not acceptable by Six Apart standards and we're going to make sure this is resolved in as timely and unobtrusive a matter as possible.

For users who've already opened help tickets, we'll be following up with this message. Please understand that when we know more information, you'll hear from us. Thanks again for your patience and understanding that with a successful service, there are sometimes short term growing pains. We hope to resolve these problems soon, we'll keep you informed and then return to the level quality that we've promised and you've come to expect.

Posted by Mena Trott at 11:46 AM | Permalink

02.26.2004

Performance Problems Fixed

As we mentioned in the update to our last post, the new hardware was installed at 1:30am Pacific time. The synchronization process took longer than expected, but it completed at 11:30am Pacific time today, and website performance is now back to the normal responsiveness.

Thank you again for your patience, and as mentioned in the previous post, all TypePad users will be credited 3 days of free service.

Posted by Mena Trott at 12:51 PM | Permalink

02.25.2004

Website Performance Update

Over the past twenty-four hours you may have noticed website sluggishness on TypePad-generated sites.

What happened?

The sluggishness was caused by a hardware issue on one of our storage servers. Because our systems are set up to be redundant, your web sites were never down, but performance was impacted. To fix it, we'll be replacing the faulty hard drive with a replacement, and we'll be working to strengthen our systems for further redundancy for the future.

What does this mean for existing TypePad users?

Because the sluggishness of the last 24 hours is not up to our standard of service for TypePad, we'll be crediting all TypePad accounts with 3 free days of service. If you're a trial user, your trial will be extended by 3 days; if you're a paying subscriber, your billing date will be extended by 3 days.

This credit will take place depending on your status (trial versus paying) as of March 5, 2004.

How is it being fixed?

Because we'd like to remedy this situation as soon as possible for our subscribers and their readers, we're planning for an unscheduled downtime. The hardware fix will require 30 minutes of downtime and is scheduled for 2:30-3:00 Pacific time today (February 25, 2004). To minimize downtime, we're preparing as many of the hardware updates as we can offline; because these are taking longer than expected, we're pushing back the downtime to 12-12:30am Pacific time.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding and, again, we apologize for this inconvenience.

Update: The downtime was actually from about 12:50-1:30am Pacific time. As of 1:30am TypePad is back up and running, and we've fixed the hardware problem. There may be some lingering slowness here and there over the next few hours as the new hardware synchronizes, but everything is back up and running, and we thank you again for your patience!

Posted by Mena Trott at 01:30 PM | Permalink

02.24.2004

Website Sluggishness

We apologize for the sluggishness of TypePad-powered sites this morning, and we're working to resolve the hardware problem that's causing it. Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Benjamin Trott at 09:08 AM | Permalink

02.16.2004

Mobile Announcements at DEMO 2004

Six Apart is participating in DEMO 2004, and this morning we made some big announcements regarding mobile features for TypePad. You can see some of these features in action at our DEMO or Bust! moblog.

The mobile features below will be released in a major update to TypePad within the next couple of weeks.

Posting Controls on Moblogs

Instead of just one email address that can post to the moblog, allow multiple authors to post, or allow anyone with access to email post with a Public Moblog (like the DEMO 2004 Moblog).

Audio Content

In addition to photos and text, audio content can now be sent to a moblog--perfect for annotating a photo while on vacation, or capturing the ambient sounds at a soccer game.

Palm Client

To make moblogging an even simpler process, we will be releasing a Palm client for posting photos and text to TypePad weblogs and moblogs, perfect for blogging from the road.

Custom Moblog Templates

You will be able to select from custom moblog-specific templates, optimized for the display of posts from mobile phones.

Better Weblog Integration

Photos sent from a mobile device are now resized if they are too wide for your weblog, providing a better viewing experience for your visitors, and you can include a number of the most recent photos sent to your moblog into the sidebar column of your weblog.

Moblogging Availability for All Levels

Moblog functionality will now be available to TypePad Basic users in addition to Plus and Pro.

Posted by Mena Trott at 03:38 PM | Permalink

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