Typepad And Feedburner Woes Lead To Author Confusion

Let me apologize for any confusion about recent posts, and let me also clarify things.

This blog, /Message, has been a solo act since its inception. However, I am now involved in turning it into a micro business, and as part of that, I am bringing on some other contributors.

I would like to note that various stats on /Message have been growing in the past year. For example, consider this graph, contrasting /Message with Nick Carr and Scott Karp's blogs. (I picked these two almost randomly, and since they were featured in a post I wrote this morning.)

Compete.com snapshot: stoweboyd.com (rank #44,946), roughtype.com (#79,365), publishing2.com (#54,074), originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I like to see that /Message has grown almost 2000% in the previous twelve months.

Anyway, back to the explanations.

• Typepad -- the blog technology I am currently using for /Message -- does not permit me to simply move the name of a blog post's author to the top of a post, just under the title, where I would like to have it. This one of the ten thousand or so small peeves I have with Typepad. Typepad does have the redeeming characteristic of being easy to use, however. I understand that a new rev of Typepad is in the works, but after all the bad mouthing I have directed at Six Apart (like How Not To Run A Customer Advisory Board) I am not being shown any of that, nor am I being whitegloved in their hypothetical VIP program. So I will just have to wait and see if what they have solves the many issues I have. If so, cool, I might stay. If not, I will migrate off to Wordpress, as so many have recommended. In the meantime, we have adopted a new style: we will each post with the first line showing our name, and -- at least in my case -- the location where I was when I posted the piece. (I won't go back to all the archives, though.)
• Feedburner -- It turns out that although Typepad was building the RSS feed correctly, with the actual authors' names in the posts, Feedburner's regurgitated feed -- the one that people are pulling into their RSS readers -- was taking out the actual authors and replacing it with my name. I tracked it down to the Feedburner SmartCast module, which was enabled, now disabled. It was changing the author information in every post.

As a result of these two things, many people thought that Matt Balara's first post here yesterday, Why Aren't You Talking To Me?, was written by me. Not so.

At any rate, welcome to /Message, Matt! I will try to make the experience better for the others that will be coming aboard in the upcoming weeks.

Comments

[Lakshmi Mareddy]

Have you even considered wordpress Stowe?

I think it would give you a better creative control over look feel. I know wordpress and have no clue about typepad to give you better advice. But I do know you can import typepad posts into wordpress smoothly.

I am willing to help you set up a wordpress site, if you wish :)