The TypePad Beta Blog

Update for Beta: Off to A Great Start!

A huge thanks to everyone on our Beta team! You have been giving us some great feedback, and it’s great to see the TypePad community so invigorated. With your help, we’re building something great.

During this Beta, we're also fixing some of your long-standing requests for TypePad. One huge request is improving the overall compose experience.

Starting with today's update, we're giving you some of your most-requested fixes for compose in a series of several updates. Today's improvements include:

• Real blockquote for everyone. Hooray! We know you've missed this feature, so we've been working hard at this one.
• The “return” key in any browser should move you a full paragraph break down, just as you would expect a web editor to work. No more mixing of single/double spacing (<p> and <br> tags, for those of you who had been fixing this in the HTML tab.) Some of you who've gotten used to the workarounds for this in Safari (like I have) may want a quick refresher: a carriage return is a double space, and a shift-return is a single space.
• Viewing a post in the HTML window? Now it’s got cleaner code: the way you’ve lined up your entry should be broken into paragraphs, matching the paragraph breaks you see in Rich Text mode.

We’re listening to your feedback and we're working on making the dashboard more useful, accessible, and interesting. Stay tuned for more updates about the dashboard – how we’re evolving individual elements, like suggestions for people you should follow, stats, and more.

Here's some other requests we're hearing from you that we're working on for upcoming releases to Beta for those of you previewing the new TypePad:

• Stats - how you interact with your stats, and how you can use them to better engage with your readers. There's still some bugs we’re ironing out, but I think we can all say that we’re excited about cool new stats!
• Following – if you’re not previewing the new design, you might not even know what we’re talking about, but we're still in the first iteration of how following will work with your blogs.
• If you haven’t updated your profile and started following people, update your profile now. It is a great way to get to know your readers, follow conversations…and drive traffic to your blog.
• Pages: we’re still tinkering with how pages fit into the workflow.
• You can read Everything TypePad tomorrow for more on the updates and improvements we’ve made for everyone.

Thanks again to everyone who is giving us feedback- if you haven’t tried it yet, we’d love to know what you think, preview the new TypePad today!

Get ready for the summer’s biggest blockbuster: the All New TypePad.

Coming soon to a blog near you!

In the summer blockbuster spirit, we’re inviting you, our Beta team, to a pre-screening of the new TypePad. Starting today, we’re giving you access to the All New TypePad. We've been testing the new version for weeks, and we think it’s an absolute joy to use.  We’re excited that we can share it with you.

Professor Wibbels has put together a quick video to tell you about some the benefits of the new TypePad: ease of use, new ways to find readers and great blogs, better tools to build a vibrant community, and more.

Ready to get started? Click on “Preview the New TypePad” and start blogging. You’ll be able to seamlessly switch back and forth between the old and new with just a couple of clicks. (But we know you’ll love the new one!)

Your feedback will help make the new TypePad better.

This is just the beginning. We have tons of improvements and new features you’ve requested coming your way.

From everyone on the TypePad team, we’re happy you’re blogging with us, and we’re ecstatic you’re going to be among the first to see the new TypePad and to help us create the future of blogging.

PS: Read more about the mission of the new TypePad on Everything TypePad.

New mp3 Player for Audio Files

One of the cool things we do around Six Apart is a hack day, where our engineers can work on features you've requested. It's a creative way for our team to express themselves, and to address some features we know you'll like, but might not always be part of the core product. Ben's latest effort is one of my recent favorites:

For my hack, I integrated SoundManager 2 (a fantastic javascript library for playing MP3s) with TypePad. When you upload an MP3 file in your posting screen, you'll now get a new option to insert the audio file as either a text link (just like you did before) or using the fancy new audio player. The player renders inline on your blog so that people reading your blog never need to leave.

Check it out!

Ruoho Ruotsi - Afternoon Delighting

Got a favorite feature you want to see? Let us know in the comments.

Changing the URL (Filename) of Your Post

We're particularly excited about this feature because it's one of the top SEO requests from customers.  For those of you that don’t know, SEO stands for “search engine optimization”, which is the process of improving your blog’s page rank within search result pages. Whether you want to use filenames for SEO purposes or you just want more control over your filenames, we've now made it easy for you to edit the URLs of your posts. 

Previously in TypePad, the filename of your post was automatically generated when the post was first saved (either as draft or when published). The filename generated was based on the 'originating' title of the post.  Thus even if you edited the title of the post, the filename would always remain the same.  Those of you who often save use drafts understand what a big pain it is to not be able to edit those 'temporary' URLs that you had in draft.

Now you can specify the filename of the post while you’re in Compose, as well as edit the filename of the post anytime afterwards. Additionally you can edit old and new post filenames.  If you’ve edited page filenames in the past, this feature will work in exactly the same way. 

Test the feature

You will need to select Filename from Display Options within Compose.  Try it out on various types of posts:

• Both new and old posts
• Blank and weird character filenames
• Filenames already in use will be saved as "example-1.html"

Tell us what you think

Have something to say? Leave a comment to this post telling us what you like, what you don't like or if you found anything confusing or hard to use. Think you see a bug? Let us know in the comments, or by opening a help ticket.