The TypePad Beta Blog

Now In Beta: New Design Section and Theme

We have improved the design section and introduced a new theme that is taking advantage of the new design section. Our goal is to make the design section more flexible so you — and outside designers — can add new themes and designs to your blog. One of the biggest benefits is you can create blog designs and preview them before you make changes live on your blog.

We’ve been testing the Design change for a few weeks, but we need more feedback from you. If what to try out the new design, here are few things to keep in mind:

• The new design allows you to duplicate and save your designs. We recommend you duplicate your design and then start tweaking.

• The new model is two step: after you work on a design and save the design, you still need to apply it to your blog.

• You can preview new designs but it may not be an exact preview of all of your content.

New Super-powered Theme: Mosaic
We’ve also introduced a new theme that takes advantage of the new Design paradigm. The Mosaic theme allows you to upload an image as your banner and will automatically “tile” it to fit the space. If you’ve been looking to update your “old fashioned” blog quickly and easily, this is a great way to do it.

Post by Email
TypePad has had post by email for over 5 years. Now in Beta is a huge improvement to the formatting of your post and more “Do What I Mean” (DWIM) capabilities. If you include a YouTube or Flickr URL in your email, we’ll automatically render it with nice formatting. Try it out and let us know what you think.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Now In Beta: Share Comments on Twitter and Facebook

First, a big "thank you" to all the Beta members who provided feedback about the image, video and audio upload tools from the last release. Your feedback has led to some great improvements to the video and audio upload functions and we’ve made them available to everyone.

You had a lot of feedback – to our support team and on the blog – about the new image upload feature so we’re keeping that in Beta while we work on it. We did fix a number of the bugs you identified, but we also want to improve the overall experience. 

So, on to the cool new feature we have ready for you in Beta this week.

Let Your Readers Share Their Comments
We’ve introduced to Beta members a new way for your commenters to promote your blog and publish their thoughtful comments on Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. You can now allow your readers to directly tweet or share their comment on Facebook as they leave a comment. This is a another way your audience can help you reach a wider audience.

If you are using the default TypePad commenting system (not TypePad Connect), you can turn this on by going to Settings > Comments > and turn on Comment Sharing. 

If you want to have your commenters help drive more readers, give it a try and let us know what you think.

Now In Beta: The Easiest Way to Add Images, Videos, and Audio to your Blog

Innovation is not something that happens with dreaming big and then – wham! – its done. Innovation comes from inspiration, perspiration, and iteration.

The latest additions to Beta are inspired design and engineering efforts that we want to share with you. To truly make them great, we need your suggestions.  Please check out your TypePad blog, try out the new features and let us know your feedback so we can make them extraordinary.

Tweet This Post

We believe your blog is part of an entire social ecosystem online. We’ve added a “Tweet This” option at the end of your post to allow your readers to share and promote your post. If you have already shared your post on Twitter or Facebook, our “Tweet This” feature will use the same Bit.ly URL so you can monitor and analyze your “social” traffic. 

To add "Tweet This" to your blog, go to Design > Organize Content > Post Footer and select "Tweet This."

Bonus: we’ve also styled the Digg and Delicious links so you have the option of logos in addition to the text link version.

Adding video, images and audio

We’ve heard you and we agree. Video should be easier to add to your blog so we’ve made it easier. I'm not going to explain it in great detail, because we want you to try it out and let us know your thoughts.

And images need to be easier, too! Try this out: upload multiple images and try out the new gallery formatting.

And yes, audio, too! Try it out with your favorite MP3s.

As always, we look forward to your feedback. You can let us know in the comments below or contact us through the ticketing system. Thanks, in advance, for your suggestions.

Comment with Twitter and Facebook

We're excited about new feature this week - commenting with Twitter and Facebook. Just recently, we added the ability for people to log in with their Facebook or Twitter credentials to leave a comment on TypePad blogs. As a special bonus for you on our Beta team, we're making it even easier - now, in your comment form, your readers will see that they can log in to leave a comment with either of Facebook or Twitter.

Being able to log in with other accounts to leave comments means you'll have more ways to let your readers connect with you and your blog. Just another cool new feature helping to connect your blog to teh social web with the all-new TypePad.

How to try it: your blog must be on basic templates, and must not have TypePad Connect enabled. Let us know if you need help getting a test blog set up, or how to make sure your blog's comments are set up to show this feature off to its best potential.

bit.ly integration in the new TypePad

We added a great new feature to Beta this week: real-time bit.ly stats.

Now, when you share you new posts on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, TypePad shortens your post URLs through the bit.ly service. And now in TypePad you can get simple statistics on how often those links are clicked.

To see how this feature works, sign in to the All New TypePad and check the stats for your blog. Below the traffic graph you’ll see a new link:

Whereas SEO is about helping search engines find your blog, Social Media Optimization helps people find your blog in the places they’re hanging out online.

Click the link and you’ll see a page of real-time clickthrough stats on posts that you’ve shared with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.Click on the bit.ly URL for each of the entries for more detailed stats directly from bit.ly. Simple!

Sidenote:

If you haven't shared any posts on Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed, then you won't see any bit.ly stats.

If you're not sharing your posts with your friends, it's really easy to set up.  Check out the TypePad Knowledge Base for detailed instructions.

We need your feedback to make this feature better! Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Fast and Fun: the New TypePad Bookmarklet

When we started to rethink the new TypePad, we knew that we needed to make blogging easier than ever.

Today we’re releasing to the beta team one of the coolest recent innovations: the TypePad bookmarklet, Blog It.  The TypePad bookmarlet allows you to easily blog anything you discover online: your favorite quote on a blog, a video from YouTube, a photo from flickr, virtually anything can be blogged instantly.

See the bookmarklet in action and discover the cure for bloggers block. >>

The TypePad booklmarklet is currently in beta. Please try out the bookmarklet today and let us know what you think.

Note: The TypePad bookmarklet is currently not compatible with Internet Explorer 8.

Blockquote's Back (all right!)

We've been adding more people to the preview of the new TypePad, and I really want to thank all of you on the beta team for all of your feedback: the new TypePad wouldn't be possible without you.

I just wanted to highlight one of my favorite features that you've been asking for - the blockquote function:

Blockquote's been back for a while now, actually, but I've heard a lot of people asking about it. In the new TypePad, it's there in the middle of the formatting bar. Try it out!

More and more people are checking out the new TypePad, but we still want to test some new things just for you here in the beta. Next week, we've got one of my very favorite features coming up - I actually did a little dance when I saw the team demo it for us. Stay tuned next week for more...

Stats, Dashboard, and Guest Authors

A quick update on our stats - we had some issues with the stats we were using and y'all let us know this was a big reason keeping you from staying on the preview of the new design. So we changed today to have a better presentation of your TypePad stats that's similar to what you saw in the classic design. We're not done with how we're going to make stats even better, but we all know that stats are important!

We added a feature that lets guest authors schedule posts, which is a suggestion we had from our Get Satisfaction forums. Thanks again for letting us know you wanted to see this!'

Reply to comments via email in TypePad Connect wasn't working as expected - we've got this sorted out now. Thanks for your patience.

The dashboard on the preview now has pagination, which is cool for those of us who are loving following other bloggers there. Have you found someone you love following? (My latest fave is my friend and longtime TypePad blogger Mat - his writing is right up my alley.) Let us know your suggested people to follow in the comments.

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.

A Quick Update: Stats and Sharing

Happy Friday! Just a quick update here for Beta users previewing the new TypePad. For more updates that we've made for everyone, please check our most recent post on Everything TypePad about some of the cool features we've added and fixes we've made.

"Share This Post" for draft and scheduled posts should be working again now as expected.

Stats - we seem to be having some difficulty with our new stats program. Thanks for the consistent feedback that these aren't working for you. We've got a plan in place that will address this, but until we can get this resolved, you'll still have to click back to the old application to see your stats as expected. We've got some really cool ideas of how to integrate lots of stats, though - do you have a favorite external stats package you use?

And psst...new themes are coming from our colleagues in Japan really soon. I just got a sneak peek and I can't wait until yall see them!