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Typepad

WordPress is reigning champ for blogging platforms

Not a lot of people know that CNN Political Ticker, Mashable, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, ArtsBeat, Grist, Hollywood Life, and dozens more blogs use WordPress' Web publishing platform. Not to mention several blogs for The New York Times that also use it, including The Opinionator, Paul Krugman, and Economix.

In fact, 49 percent of the top 100 blogs in the world use WordPress, according to a new survey by Pingdom. In distant second place are custom blogs with 14 percent.

"The last few years we've really focused on both the usability and flexibility of WordPress, which has resulted in … Read more

Snapkeys' quest to assassinate QWERTY

LAS VEGAS--Israel's Snapkeys doesn't want to just be an alternative to the traditional QWERTY keyboard. It wants to kill it off for good.

The company's Ryan Ghassabian taps out sentences on his tablet with all the speed and precision of a phonetic hitman as he demos Snapkeys for me at a small booth in the far back side of the Las Vegas Convention Center here at CES.

Snapkeys is an invisible keyboard that uses 2i technology and predictive typing to eliminate the need to actually look where you're typing on touch-screen devices. For most of you, that sentence will be total nonsense, like it was to me when I first heard about Snapkeys, so here's how it actually works. … Read more

Six Apart releases tiny blog tool, TypePad Micro

Blog platform company Six Apart is adding a free, miniaturized blogging service to its paid blog hosting service TypePad. The new TypePad Micro service is essentially a simplified template, called Chroma, for unpaid users on the TypePad service. It will likely be compared with Posterous and Tumblr.

The Chroma template is flexible and attractive, and most of the blogs I've seen using it look good. It's a great format for short posts and for sharing pictures and embedded videos.

But as a short-form blog authoring platform, TypePad Micro is still TypePad, a powerful and capable blogging system that … Read more

TypePad updated: Better blog comments for all

Six Apart's paid, hosted blogging service, TypePad, is getting improved community features. The first thing most users will notice is a new blog commenting system. It has both a cleaner display of comments (with icons for the comments, WordPress-style), as well as a simpler comment entry interface. Users can also reply to particular comments and the system supports one level of threading.

The updated comments service hooks into TypePad's new profile system. Commenters with TypePad IDs get a place that collects all the comments they leave on all TypePad comment-enabled blogs, and users can add feeds from … Read more

Reports: TypePad unblocked in China

Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.

As with any such event, we're not sure how long this will last, and we're not sure why it happened. Tim Johnson, a McClatchy Newspapers correspondent based in China, writes:

I'm celebrating, of sorts. For the first time in maybe a year, this blog and others on the typepad.com host can now be seen within China. They are no longer blocked.

Why did the blocking suddenly end? I have no idea. Someone just flicked a switch.

The last sentence gave me an idea. … Read more

TypePad responds to criticism from blogger

There are a number of recent postings on this blog about companies coping with computer problems - the theme being that the way a company handles problems tells you something that you could not otherwise learn, how reliable they are in a pinch. The TypePad story came from blogger Alan Shimel who wrote about his experience trying to recover his account after bad guys learned his password and defaced his blog.

The unedited comments* below are from Anil Dash a Vice President at Six Apart, the company behind TypePad.

Michael, I work with the team at TypePad, and wanted to … Read more

In a pinch, GoDaddy and Typepad let a customer down

Following with the theme of my recent posting, Some companies you can trust, and some you can't, I ran across a blog posting from Alan Shimel of StillSecure (More frustrations with web infrastructure) that details how GoDaddy and Typepad let him down in his time of greatest need. Mr. Shimel was the victim of a cyber crime - his blog and domain were stolen out from under him.

GoDaddy

The first indication of trouble came to Mr. Shimel as an email message from GoDaddy stating that his domain was switched from a locked* to an unlocked status, a change … Read more

Six Apart's handy Blog It service hits the iPhone

This morning, Six Apart unveiled its newest iPhone creation, a very svelte-looking port of Blog It, which the company introduced back in April. The simple tool lets you write and cross-blog a post or status update to several services at once. The company is hoping people will use it as a home base to manage all their updates. It's also a somewhat early look at some of the features users will be getting in the upcoming native blogging application announced on Monday.

The tool started out as a Facebook app and has since pulled in about 10,000 users. … Read more

SixApart introduces native app for pocket TypePad blogging

Next month, among the slew of third-party apps hitting the iPhone's App Store, blogging tool TypePad will be giving its users a new way to blog on the go. The native application was just announced at Apple's WWDC Monday morning, but I got a sneak peek at it last week. I think it's going to be a lifesaver for bloggers who want to monitor and administrate their blogs while away from a laptop or home PC.

The app will let you write and edit posts on your phone and save them for later, helping people avoid that … Read more