Typepad Still Stuck In Second Gear

I am baffled with all the Six Apart restructuring — launching an ad network, building Blogs.com — that basic stupidities in the Typepad UI never seem to get fixed.

Consider the Typelists, so-called, that are provided so users can ‘easily’ add information to their sidebars. I have one called Events, and I would like to be able to update events that I will be attending. However, there is no way to reorder elements in a Typelist, so the ‘ease of use’ is a fallacy.

All Records | Events | Your Lists | TypePad, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Imagine I have created an entry for events in Feb 08. It is automatically posted on the site, so that much is easy. If I then want to add, say a week later, entries for Jan 09, I can create a new entry, but I can’t reorder them. If I want a different order, I have to manually move the contents of the entries around. This is insane in 2008.

Hey guys, there’s this thing called Ajax?

Along these lines, the company has announced Typepad Connect, which is an effort to compete with Disqus and IntenseDebate, which I applaud. However, users like me who have abandoned Typepad’s native commenting system can’t experiment in the beta test of Connect, because Six Apart hasn’t yet developed the ability to transition from Disqus to Connect. While converting from native Typepad comments is ‘only a few clicks’ for me it is likely to require hacking my templates and using some as yet unavailable import/export tool.