Stowe Boyd

Moving /Message To Squarespace, Part I: More Engagement

It turns out that moving my blog — on a tech basis — from Typepad to Squarespace has gone fairly well, and that the majority of hiccups along the way were operator error: my bad, in other words. Other headaches were more like pot holes: you just have to drive around them. And there have been no big showstoppers, largely thanks to the care taken by the Squarespace team in the design and implementation of their redirection and import capability.

I have felt a bit sad about moving from Typepad. It’s kind of like ending a not-so-great relationship, where the sex and the commitment wasn’t that great, but at least you knew what you were going to be doing over the weekend. I did some of my best writing using Typepad, and I have an enduring fondness for the tool. And I have had some good friendships with some folks there, most recently Michael Sippey. (I hope we can go on talking, Michael.)

Any breakup has two sides: on one side, what you have, and on the other, what you dream of.

Motivation and Preparation

I have long been less than happy with Typepad. There seem to be hundreds of niddling annoyances: the most recent being the internal search, that authors use to find old posts, was down for weeks, and for all I know it is still down.

But the fundamental problem with Typepad is its basic design. Typepad is old, even with the recent facelifts, and it is based on MoveableType, which is even older.

For reasons that escaped me at the time, and which had nothing to do with customer satisfaction, Six Apart years ago decided to build Typepad as a branch off the MoveableType tree instead of adding functionality to MoveableType. Once they launched Typepad (TP) as a hosted version of MoveableType (MP) with somewhat simplified UX, but the same basic core, they then wandered off, buying LiveJournal and building yet another blogging platform, Vox. Recently, then seem to be chasing Tumblr, but they aren’t really a tumbleblog platform, despite some good effort in that direction (see Typepad Goes After Tumblr).

The core foundation of MT and TP are stuck back in the early ’00s. Typepad and Moveable Type share a limited notion of what a blog is, how the components interact, and how people are supposed to interact with blogs, and through blogs to interact with one another.

As just one tiny example, TP supports the notion of a ‘Typelist’ which is more or less a widget that you can insert into the margin of a blog. But the sorts of widgets they supported a few years ago were very limited, like lists of pointers, or books, or music; and one escape hatch, which allowed arbirary hunks of HTML, including javascript. So, if you wanted sophisticated widgetry, you had to rely on outside services to do much of anything aside from handbuilt lists, like old style blogrolls. Six Apart later on introduced a catalog of widgets, which I have found a/ largely unusable and b/ not very social, however.

The core problem of Typepad is a design philosophy, where the published blog is treated strictly as a means for blog reading by outsiders, like a newspaper. And other, more modern approaches — like Tumblr and Squarespace — allow the author and other contributors do things right on the pages of the blog. And behind the scenes these new platforms support very rich user experiences for publishers and collaborators.

I have been hoping for years that I could manage client relationships in the ‘near context’ of /Message.

In the case of Tumblr, a very rich sharing model — another example of the open follower model that animates Twitter and other streaming apps — makes ‘authoring’ in the Tumblr space a wonderfully augmented social experience (see Why I Am Obsessed With Tumblr, And Why That Matters). However, I have decided that Tumblr is not the right place for /Message (see Giving Up On Moving To Tumblr).

In the case of Squarespace, once I have logged into my blog, I am able to tweak formats, add new posts, and ultimately gain access to all the system’s capabilities directly. With Typepad, a user has to login to a completely different experience, totally off the published blog.

As a simple example of why this is a pain, if I were looking at a post on the old /Message Typepad blog and I saw a typo, I had to browse to a different URL — the www.typepad.com website — login, then pick which blog of my several Typepad blogs I wanted to work on, then I’d click on ‘posts’ once I had selected /Message, and then I would have to find the specific post with the typo. If that post was from the last day or so, I would see it;but  if it was a few months ago I would have to search for it, or scroll back page by page until I found it. And did I mention the internal search is broken?

On Squarespace, I can just enter edit mode with one mouse click while on the page with the typo, then click on which post to edit, then fix the typo and save. Just this one use case is likely to save me hours (days?) every year. And that use case is paralleled by many others.

Any breakup has two sides: on one side, what you have, and on the other, what you dream of. You’ve heard the basic negative motivations, but let me stress some aspirations that were pulling me to Squarespace:

1. I wanted a simpler, more direct authoring experience, as I discussed a moment ago.
2. I wanted more control of the templates and styling in my blogs. Squarespace offers a lot in that regards, but that wasn’t the biggest driver.
3. I wanted a richer experience for the community of ‘readers’. I wanted people participating in what I am doing with blogs to have a wider range of social experiences.

Working With Companies: A Motivating Use Case

Imagine that I am advising a small start-up. They probably met me in the first place because of something I wrote. I am not well-known because I am a movie star, a millionaire, or the former marketing VP of Apple. What I do have is a large body of writing that goes back 10 years plus, and many of the opportunities I get to work with people is because they read something I wrote that they think is smart at /Message.

And then our experience leaves the /Message context. We wander off to some collaboration tool, or email, or f2f. All of which have their place. But I have been hoping for years that I could manage client relationships in the ‘near context’ of /Message. And by ‘near context’ I don’t mean totally out in the open — since companies do still have secrets — but somehow embedded into the /Message context.

Squarespace allows me to create additional ‘journals’ — blogs — which can have different ‘audiences’ — groups of individuals who can access them in controlled ways. So I can — and am — creating subordinate blogs for each of my clients which are visible to them and me, and no one else. For example, I can create a blog called ‘AdjectiveNoun’ for a hypothetical company of that name, and provide accounts to the several founders. Only they and I can see the blog, or enter it. I can give any of that group the ability to make posts, and more importantly, we immediately have a private group blog in which to discuss their companies issues. Here’s what a member fo the AdjectiveNoun team would see on this page:

As you can see, at the bottom left of the screenshot above, the founders of AdjectiveNoun would see the private blog, and no one else, aside from me, would. And I can do the same — and will be doing the same — for all my clients.

Why? So that I can write write a fully public post — like this one — and then I could write private ‘add on’ posts for clients, where I can detail what the points I made in the general context mean for them specifically. For example, if I were working with a media client researching blog technologies, I might write a few paragraphs about this Typepad v Squarespace comparison relative to their needs. Or after a long post reviewing an innovative URL shortener, I would write an add on post for the folks at Bit.ly (who are a real world client, in fact.)

Note that Squarespace doesn’t yet provide any direct support for these add ons, but I am not sure yet what I would like it to be anyway. I will have to do it for a few weeks or months.

The General Use Case

The average visitor here now has more capabilities to interact with me, and other visitors, as well. In the left margin of the new /Message I have created a Squarespace forum called Open Forum, a structured, threaded discussion list. I invite anyone to add topics of interest, or add to existing ones. I have salted the forum with a few topics, like ‘The Fall Of Privacy, The Rise Of Publicy’ and ‘Sightings In NYC’. Check them out.

Next Up: Moving In

Later this week, I will write up the actual experience of building this new site — which is way more than a single blog — and the issues involevd with moving in. So far, so good: but moving onto Squarespace is not for the faint at heart, as you will see in the next post about this.