TypePad Calendar Tweak

I recently bitched about Typepda’s new blog editor ‘upgrade’ which seemed to me to be a step backwards at the best (see /Message: TypePad’s Big Improvements To User Experience: Ha!). The one niddling little example I used to characterize the true dumbness of Typepad’s UX was the calendar dating dialog:

As just one tiny example of absolute UI stupidity that refuses to die, consider the date interface below.

TypePad - Edit Post, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Imagine for one minute that you’d like to date a post, say 16 December 2006. This interface does not allow you to simply type in the date. You have to click the tiny little button, going back one month at a time, until (eventually) you get to December 2006.

Bless their pointly little heads, they took my griping to heart (due to the labors of Ginevra Whalen), and they have added the obvious date field:

TypePad, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I will give credit where credit is due, and they did fix that annoying UI design error. But I am still moving ahead with my plans to move /Message and my other Typepad hosted blogs over to Tumblr as soon as I can, for a long list of reasons, only one of which is the headache caused by this recent ‘improvement’ in the user experience at Typepad.

Let me just list a random sample of the annoyances that haven’t been fixed, or have been introduced, in this last release:

1. Editor offers me no way to set my preferred editing mode as a default (HTNL, convert lines breaks) so I have to set for every new post. Note: this was introduced in the new ‘improved’ release.
2. I can create new authors, but I can’t edit their profile information unless I log in as them: which isn’t hard since I assigned their passwords, but still, once they change their passwords I can’t do it at all.
3. In a blog with multiple authors, wouldn’t it be nice to automatically create an about page that consolidates the various authors’ profiles?
4. Authors other than the owner of an account can add a picture to their profile, but their is no primitive in the template language to allow me to access them. I can only get at the picture of the owner.
5. If you fixed the above problem, then it would be nice to be able to automatically have the photo of each post’s author appear in their posts.
6. The mechanism for importing a banner into a template is based on a single image file, which is not the way that modern designers build websites.

Anyway, you get the idea.