Stowe Boyd | Posted on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 07:03AM Typepad 2.0: Ready For The Next Phase
I recently gave the new Typepad a trial. Note that I was strongly biased against Six Apart ever getting it together and doing something innovative and cool with the aging Typepad system. I had skinned my knees and bumped my head on all the weird, fucked-up, and plan dumb design decisions embedded in the old Typepad, as only a hardcore, heavily invested user can do.
So, I had planned to exit Typepad just as soon as I could figure out one little snag: finding another blogging solution that could regenerate the same URLs for all my posts. That turned out to be a considerable barrier, although I found a few (like Squarespace) that seemed to have at least a possibility of getting there.
But I decided to give ole Typepad one more look.
I officially announce that the Six Apart folks have done something pretty cool, and that I am going to keep my /message blog here, after all. (They might have been happier if I left, considering all the griping they get from me.)
Much of the old Typepad is still there, under new wall paper, and some of that is still annoying. (As one example, Typepad supports handy lisks that you can create and publish in the sidebar of your blog. You can add, edit, and delete the items in these so-called Typelists, but you can't reorder them. Who thought that was a nice-to-have and not an essential feature of lists?)
On the other hand, they have extensively reworked the editor and the commenting system, as well as transitioning to a streaming model for the core user experience, providing a whole new sort of social dimension to Typepad that inherits the following model of Tumblr in a very cool way. A number of small things --- like an easy way to post to Twitter -- are helpful, but the big thing is a new concept of socializing around blogs presented in a streaming user experience for the blogger.
In the screenshot above I have captured my 'dashboard', which displays recent activities from those that I am following in Typepad and me. It displays comments, who is following who, and other social actions. I don't understand why it doesn't stream my posts or posts those that I am following -- at least a title and excerpt -- but I hope they will adopt that convention in the future as well.
They have regrooved the comment system to be more of a competitor to tools like Disqus, which, try as I might, I never came to more than tolerate. As a result, I have turned on Typepad commenting again on this blog, and installed Typepad code into my Tumblr blog, /ambivalence, as well. (I also plan to roll it out onto other Tumblr blogs, like Microsyntax.org, over the next weeks.)
These external blog comments also show up in the dashboard stream which will make distributed comments easier to deal with over time.
Mostly, though, this generation-- Typepad 2.0, basically -- demonstrates that the folks at Six Apart are ready, willing and able to reconceive their tools in the light of new ideas about plumbing in social media. Now guys, could you please fix that niddling little bug with the Typelists?
Reader Comments (9)
You'll see all sorts of new cool stuff on TypePad coming soon. I'm psyched. :)
But as for the Typepad Connect comments, I've had to uninstall them, because they've caused a lot of problems for my readers and regular commenters:
Here's the problem: I click on a comment's "reply" link. Just for a fraction of a section I see the little text box open up that says "Reply to ...", but then it vanishes just as quickly, because the whole screen jumps back to the very top of the page. In the browser URL bar, the post's address is changed to: ......html#tpe-action-resize-290 It is this "resize-290", whatever it is, that takes the user who wishes to reply to a specific comment back to the top of the page. As you can imagine, this can be very annoying on a post with, say, 40 comments, because it means you have to scroll down again and look for the comment. Now, very often, after scrolling down to the comment in question again and clicking on "reply" it works and the reply textbox remains in place and allows you to enter your reply. But frequently, too, the process as described above is repeated, with the screen jumping to the very top of the page again. It is only then, after scrolling down to the post in question again and clicking on "reply" that it actually works. What's that thing with "resize-290" anyway? It clearly interferes with the functionality. If anything, the address, I think, isn't long enough, as there should be an identifier for the comment one wishes to reply to in order to keep the screen in that specific position of the comment. This problem occurs in all common browsers (Firefox, IE).
In fact, I tried posting a comment on a Typepad blog earlier today, where the comment count had already reached something like 70 or 80 comments. I wanted to reply to one specific comment, but the screen kept jumping around on me (as described above), and several times I had to scroll up and down to find the comment I wanted to reply to. What could have been a quick reply turned out to be a major production and time-waster. Most other commenters would have given up and not posted a comment at all -- which doesn't reflect well on a blog's reputation.
Also, Connect comments are completely invisible and inaccessible to anyone who has Javascript disabled in their browser (about 10% of my readers). Plus, those who surf the net using their Blackberry or similar device don't get to see the Javascript-based Connect comments either.
Not only do these users not get to see previous comments, but they can't even post a comment of their own.
It only seems to happen when you use the "reply" feature. I suppose if you simply add another comment to the thread, it may not present itself in that way.
Also, I'd love to have more CSS customization control over Connect comments. Right now, you can change color of links and font family, but that's about it. Right now, for example, I use different background colors for odd- and even-numbered comments. This wouldn't be possible in Connect.
(PS: Werner, just got your followup note RE: Vox - I'll respond there, and have sent that along to the Vox support team.)
interesting.nice comment ginevra