Typepad improving slowly, but steadily

[Six Apart's Michael Sippey. Photo by Yaniv Golan.]

Last December, I posted a complaint that Typepad, my blog publishing platform had not improved for a long time and if it did not get better sooner, I would leave it soon. Almost immediately, Michael Sippey, who runs Typepad contacted me and asked me to join him for lunch.

I had not previously met Michael and found him credible and easy to like. But that was not going to be enough to keep me, I told him, the platform had so many areas needing improvements, I didn't know where to begin.

He told me that in order to get Six Apart's family blogging platform, Vox launched, internal technology resources had been diverted and that they were being restored to Typepad.  He told me that I was see changes every couple of weeks, some small, other subtle, but over time I would notice real changes.

This has been generally true. Very slowly, very steadily Tyepad has been improving, with new and better templates, with better spam filtering, making it easy to take down offensive comments.

Today, with very little fanfare,they came up with a new and improved comment management system. Now, I can read an entire comment inside my email client, rather than having to log in, then register then comment. They took three asenine steps and turned it in to one simple step. Very cool.

In my opinion, they deserve recognition because they still have some distance to go before I give them anything like a blogging ovation. I think Sippey desreves credit because he is doing what he said he would do in about the way he said he would.

I'm not a product reviewer type and I have used Wordpress too little to make any credible comparison. Wordpress is newer and it is open source and that gives it some advantages. But I am among millions of users who have a great deal of legacy invested in Typepad and I am very pleased to see headway being made.

 

Comments

[Bernie Goldbach]

I run two Wordpress blogs and think Typepad's ease of managing content across different blogs much easier than any other platform I've used in the last five years of blogging.

[Justin Thorp]

I hope they fix printing typepad blog posts.

[Katie]

I can't wait for them to make the Typelists more functional. To just have the ability to change the order of items in a Typelist (without all the frustrating copy/pasting), would brighten my day immediately!

Anyone else who would love more options with Typelists?

[michael sippey]

Shel, thanks for the post. We have more features in the pipeline that you'll see in the coming weeks. And as you know, we're investing a great deal of engineering and operations resources in TypePad's infrastructure, and based on reporting the third-party monitoring tools we use we're making some great progress.

Katie -- thanks for the feedback on TypeLists; we are definitely looking for ways to improve them functionally and make them easier to use.