TypePad - the cool new blogging tool and community is now in Preview. It used to be in Beta for a random sample of volunteers. I didn't volunteer, but am taking the plunge now. As I've been saying, TypePad is a hot, hot blogging tool if you want your blogging cool and easy. You have many good-looking style options. You pick your own colors from attractive defaults. There are several innovative options that I would never get around to if I didn't have it delivered to me on a silver platter. Yoo hoo! This is your silver platter!
It's taken me several hours to set it up. I now have a few friends, ten books, five blogs and ten aggregator links entered. I've picked my general format - 3 columns instead of 2. I wanna see if that's an improvement. I selected the medium-strength monthly charge which is $8.95 I think but I get a 20% discount since i was on their email list - as long as I stay a monthly member without fail.
Even though it is way cool, I've run into places where I can't edit certain fundamental aspects of the page to my dismay. From the looks of things, I may need to bump up to their pro version to get the style details the way I want them. You can go over and check out my still half-baked, but interesting efforts at tokerud.typepad.com. I'll be your guinea pig. I suggest you wait till I find the glitches and gotchas before you sign up. But don't hesitate if you just can't wait. We can commiserate or celebrate whatever the case may be.
TypePad is the blogging tool for the rest of us a la Steve Jobs' idea of "the rest of us". The rest of us in this case means those who (1) are talented, creative and/or want to express themselves on the web, but (2) don't want to have to get geeky about it and (3) still want to have their blog look cool. In addition, you get some leading edge online community aspects since typepad is server-based. It's an all-in-one service. Six Apart, TypePad's makers, is my new web host. They've got the data there. I'll need to find out more about backups and that sort of thing.
I think I'm keeping this blog as my home base. I'll point you over to blog B: Tech Ronin a la TypePad when something cool is going on over there. I'm in the 30-day evaluation period. I may not make the switch after all. But I hope so. In a few minutes, I'll post my intro entry at Tech Ronin.
Here's a couple cool things I get over there. They use the friend of a friend (FOAF) XML standard so my data on friends will be able to play well with others. I'm hoping for friend of friend diagrams and small world effects. And, you'll be the first to know. They've got book, music and link lists that lookup data directly from web sources when you type in a ISBN number or URL. They've got photo albums up the wazoo! And, an About page where I can put my bio and such. I want even more, but these are goodies I want to play with now. And they count visitors for you. Yippee!
By the way, if you are a Movable Type blogger now, they plan to migrate some of this new functionality over to Movable Type in a while so waiting may be a good option for you.
What's a Tech Ronin? Well, you'll have to see over at my new blog, now, won't you?