Typepad Service Returns

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 12/19 at 11:06 AM • Blogging News

Blogging software Typepad is back up and running, at least according to the Typepad news blog. The service reports that all posts, files, and photos are restored, and urges customers with outstanding issues to get in touch.

They promise more detailed information on what happened “in the coming day.”

 
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Books and Blogs a Natural Pairing

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 12/19 at 10:57 AM • Blogs

The New York Times has a piece today that talks about the benefits and problems for authors who get discussed on blogs:

At best, blogs can be the electronic version of word-of-mouth selling. Luis Alberto Urrea has written more than 10 books, but it wasn’t until he published his novel ”The Hummingbird’s Daughter” earlier this year that he experienced the joys of being blogged (sympathetically) on sites like Bookslut and La Bloga. “I had never paid attention to that whole world before,” said Urrea. Now, he has his wife comb the Web every morning, filtering out anything too harsh. “You’re always braced for bad news,” he said, “but blogs have been so friendly.” Urrea (who said he responded to every e-mail message he got) compares the blog world to a country store with a cracker barrel, where he and his readers are playing checkers. “It’s so immediate and informal.”

Read ”What Are the Blogs Saying About Me?”

Shameless professional plug: Hop Studios recently produced a blog for cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum. The blog, Real Baking with Rose, is sponsored by Gold Medal Flour, and is being featured on flour packages in grocery stores. Author Rose has transitioned seamlessly from book writing to blog writing, making herself part of the conversation instead of just observing it from the outside.

 
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PMachine Announces a Ma-a-a-jor Upgrade to Expression Engine

Posted by Travis Smith on 12/17 at 12:37 AM •

Why always on a Friday? So, Pmachine, the company that makes Expression Engine, announced today that version 1.4 is available.

Oy, where to start?  Well, first of all, this is an upgrade from 1.3.2 to 1.4, but it looks like there are MANY, MANY changes.  Lots to absorb.

But the changes seem to be in three main categories: pricing, the user interface, and what I’m going to call “Other”

PRICING

Unlike every other company in the world that start off free and then switch to a paid model—PMachine originally only offered Expression Engine for sale, but they’ve gone and are now offering a free version.

In a nutshell, if you’re using it for personal use, and you are happy with their core system, go download it now!

If you’re a personal blogger but want the whole version, they lowered (yes, lowered) the price to $100 (it was $150).

If you’re a commercial blogger, it’s still $250.  Personally, I think this is a bit of a steep jump, but on the other hand, I like the simplicity, and instead of penalizing people for being popular or having multiple authors or blogs, they’ve made a pretty clear line: if you’re making money, they make money too.  OK, fair enough.

Read the whole pricing message here.  Incidentally, you other companies out there, when you make a big change in the price of your product, do write a nice explanatory note like this—it makes everyone feel better.

One last note: the free version comes with no technical support.  But a) you can pay an EE developer to help you, and they’d probably get tech support because they have a paid license, and b) the best EE support is on the forums anyway, so I don’t really see how EE is going to avoid the indirect burden of supporting the free version.  They’re hoping to make it up by folks who convert to the full product, which I think will happen.

USER INTERFACE

I’ll be honest.  I haven’t had time to play with the UI much.  But here are the features that you’re going to really like:

  • Relational custom fields.  So you can have a custom list of products, or sizes, or colors, or keywords, etc. etc. for use in your main blog. (Is there any other blogging software that does this? I think not)
  • Entry versioning.  Roll back to early versions of a post.  (Again, who else offers this? No one.)
  • Multiple entry editing—make changes to more than one entry at the same time (but they don’t explain how this works...)
  • They tweaked the admin look and feel again.  I gotta say, I wasn’t a fan of the 1.3 look; this one seems a little better, but just a little.
  • Adding new categories directly from an individual entry (finally!)

I’ll be looking at all of these in depth, and figuring out what they’ve still got left to do, in the future. (Check back!)

OTHER

Gosh, everything from a search term log to a new online manual to…

  • per-item view tracking
  • more better controls many different tags.
  • better conditionals (for templates that react to varying input and output)
  • mailing list templates (oh, thank goodness)
  • more spell checking
  • slightly better comment controls (but trackbacks still seem to be second-class citizens)
  • more photo gallery controls
  • more member profile thingies

There are two super-powerful things that I’m going to have to investigate. One, the previously mentioned relational custom fields, make this finally far more than just a blogging tool.  This is now a CMS that calls itself a blogging tool.  The other is the new Extension manager that exposes the inner core of the tool to anyone without needing to hack the actual source files.  If this sounds greek to you, well, it means that your developer will be more likely to fix that niggling behavior that you want customized, because he knows that it’ll be easy and portable and less likely to break things.

MIA

What is PMachine still missing?  Well, off the top of my head, the category tag isn’t changed at all, and it needed a lot more options to be truly useful.  And the ping process doesn’t give enough feedback.  One horrible thing—the 1.3.2 version of the manual is now gone, so if you have a question about how tags USED to work, well, you’re outta luck, as they say.

And there’s still no Skype field for members and… but at this point, I feel like I’m complaining that there’s a scuff on the hull of my nuclear submarine.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a serious piece of work.

In any case, I know what I’ll be up to this weekend…

 
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Typepad Outage Hits 13 Hours

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 12/16 at 11:50 AM • Blogs -- Blogging News -- Blogging Tools

The popular hosted blogging service Typepad has been largely unavailable for 13 hours now. There’s a fair amount of foaming at the mouth (see here, here and here) occuring within the blogosphere—bloggers don’t like to be without their personal diary or business communication tool for extended periods. Many say that this failure is one in a string of service issues with the service.

The latest Everything Typepad blog post about the situation indicates that a primary disk system failed during maintenance last night, and that they are restoring backup copies from two days ago. Even for blogs that are back up, comments are as yet unavailable. This means lost blog time, lost blog posts, and lost interaction with readers. I have a fair amount of sympathy for Typepad; working in the technical world means suffering through these kinds of unpredictable and unrecoverable hardware failures, but then again, I’m not running a Typepad blog I depend on being available on a daily basis.

In ”Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies,” I spend quite a bit of time walking through the pros and cons of using a hosted blogging service—one that runs on a blogging company’s Web servers—as opposed to installing a blog software package on your own server. Chalk this one into the con side for hosted blogs.

 
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Blogsledding at Blogsndogs (and Other Topics)

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 12/06 at 05:12 PM • Blogging Events -- Blogs and Business

Well, I wussed out today and didn’t go dog sledding (Do you have any idea what the temperature is here in Banff? It turns out I’m more of a California girl than I thought!). Many of the participants went, however, including Travis, so I expect to see some great Flickr photos tonight.

Participants at BlogsnDogs seem pretty pleased by the program here so far, though there are the usual problems with packing so much technology talk into such a short time. There’s so much great energy and innovation around blogging that it’s really impossible to do much more than skim the surface of a few favorites. My fellow faculty member (and co-author!) Kris Krug did a session on Monday that highlighted some of his favorites, and attendee Monique Trottier wrote up his talk, along with a few highlights from other sessions.

I’ve uploaded my slides from a talk Robert Scales, Darren Barefoot, and I did on Monday, but probably the most pertinent item is the list of strategic reasons for blogging:

  • search engine marketing
  • direct communication
  • brand building
  • competitive differentiation
  • relational marketing
  • exploit the niches
  • media & public relations
  • reputation management
  • position expert status
  • build up trust

Tomorrow afternoon’s Blogging for Business session gives me another chance to really focus on this topic. What I’d really like to do is some hands-on exercises designed to talk folks through thinking strategically about business blogging—brainstorming about focus, audience, promotion, and so on. If you’re a BlogsnDogs attendee, help us tailor the session to you by leaving a comment describing what you’d like to explore more, and what you’d like to be able to take back home with you when you go! And if you aren’t attending, well, you can leave you wishlist, too. 

 
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Blogs n Dogs

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 12/04 at 12:42 PM • Blogging Events

imageToday I’m in FREEZING Banff, Alberta, Canada, for Blogs n Dogs, a combination blogging and dog sledding event. The blogging seminar runs through Wednesday night, and on Tuesday it’s all about dogs, snow, and sleds. Why a conference combining these two activities? Your guess is as good as mine. However, it has started me thinking about other “synergies.” How about:

  • Blogs n Baking
  • Blogs n Beaches
  • Blogs n Books
  • Blogs n Boats...

And those are just the Bs! Anyone have more good ideas? What conference would you go to?

 
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