The TypePad Beta Blog

Making Reblog Better

Last November we released a new feature called Reblog, which makes it easy for your readers to share your content others in their network.  When someone reblogs your content part, or all, of your post appears on the reblogger’s blog with attribution link back to your original post so you get the credit you deserve.

Reblog is a helpful traffic-driving tool but but we wanted it to do more. The new, improved reblog provides you with more insights into who is reblogging your posts and what posts are most popular. 

We’ve added new functionality to address these issues, including:

• Blogger notifications.  You’ll receive an email you when someone reblogs your post and a status update will appear in the Recent Activity section of your dashboard.

• Reader notifications.  The number of reblogs for a post will appear below the post and above the comments along with the profile pictures of people that have reblogged that post.
  

• More followers.  After readers reblog your post they will be prompted to follow you on TypePad to receive updates whenever you have a new post.
  

• Stats.  You can see the number of reblogs for a post in the Feedback section of the Edit Post page. 

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Turning On Reblog

If you already have Reblog on your blog you don’t need to do anyting.  If you don’t currently use Reblog you’ll need to turn it on.  While you’re at it we suggest turning on all your social features, including Favorites and the Follow Me module.

We recommend announcing the Reblog button to your readers so they know they can easily share their favorite posts on their TypePad blog.  Readers without a TypePad blog will be prompted to create a free TypePad Micro blog after reblogging your post.

Tell Us What You Think
We want your feedback before we roll the reblog improvements out to all TypePad bloggers.  After you use reblog for a few days please take a few minutes to answer these questions.  You can post your answers in the comments or give your feedback to our TypePad One support team.

1. What do you think of reblog?  Is it a good thing for you?
2. What do you think of the new notificaiton features?
3. How would you improve it?
4. Is something not working?
5. What do your readers think about it?

Also, we’re looking for examples to highlight when we roll the enhancements out to all users.  If you see an increase in traffic or create stronger connections with your readers from reblog and would like to be featured in our public announcement, please leave a comment below.

We're getting closer...

Thanks to everyone on our beta team who has been giving us such amazing feedback. We've been hearing some questions on a couple of topics in particular, so I wanted to post an update on a few key things to make sure you know what's happening.

Stats are essential to knowing what works (and doesn't) on your blog. In the preview of the new TypePad, the stats are not appearing consistently, and the data that's being presented isn't as accurate as it needs to be. So we've been back in the idea lab cooking up how to best get you the things you want from stats - more visual cues, more referrer links, more useful and reliable information. We also want you to be able to easily access your own third party solutions that can give you more rich detail about your traffic.

Your own stats are still there in the old version of TypePad, so if you want to take a look, you can click back to the previous version to see the stats you're used to. We know that's a major pain point in the new design, so hang in there - things will get better in the next couple of weeks.

New themes are something everyone asks for! We added a bunch of new themes from our team in Japan. Check them out here.

We're working on really cool new ways to customize your blog just the way you like it. You can also read our knowledge base for some great tips and tricks for customizing your blog with CSS.

Your dashboard is evolving too, thanks to your insight and feedback. You'll see changes there in the next few weeks too. It helps you see more about activity on your own blog, and to also discover cool new blogs.

People you follow is going to evolve too. The people we suggest on the dashboard that you follow are just to give you a feel for how some of the new features can work, like following other TypePad bloggers and finding other great blogs to read.We're glad you're telling us how we should be making it work for you, and want to incorporate those suggestions into the new TypePad.

Want to know what else we've been up to? Read more about it on Everything TypePad.