Two thumbs down, Typepad!
May 28, 2008
The recent "upgrade" of the Typepad interface has been an unmitigated disaster for me. I wonder if some of you who blog may have the same issue.
The response time is painfully slow; I feel like we were back in dial-up modem world.
Simple functions like changing font size are mishandled. E.g. switching from 13 to 14 to 15 made not a difference in the editing window to my eyes. That's why yesterday's post looked so weird.
If you highlight several paragraphs of text, then change font size, while nothing noticable happens, now only the first paragraph is highlighted, implying that whatever changed was only applied to the first paragraph.
The automatic thumbnail generated by Typepad looks really poor, as Derek pointed out here. The resolution is horrible; besides, the file size can be 3x that of a much larger, much clearer original image!
Trying to move around an image within the editing window has become impossible. In addition, a blank space is now placed at the position where the image is inserted in the HTML where in the past, no extra space is inserted. As a result, extra spaces show up in strange places.
BUT THERE IS MORE! HERE IS THE HOWLER!
The HTML interface is now completely useless. Look at the image below. Typepad decided to eliminate all line breaks so the entire HTML now shows up in one big paragraph, making it impossible to edit at all.
This is how a previously great company shoots itself in its foot.
I'm open to suggestions for where I should move the blog to... (Assuming you can get the commenting function to work, because I just failed multiple times)
The response time is painfully slow; I feel like we were back in dial-up modem world.
Simple functions like changing font size are mishandled. E.g. switching from 13 to 14 to 15 made not a difference in the editing window to my eyes. That's why yesterday's post looked so weird.
If you highlight several paragraphs of text, then change font size, while nothing noticable happens, now only the first paragraph is highlighted, implying that whatever changed was only applied to the first paragraph.
The automatic thumbnail generated by Typepad looks really poor, as Derek pointed out here. The resolution is horrible; besides, the file size can be 3x that of a much larger, much clearer original image!
Trying to move around an image within the editing window has become impossible. In addition, a blank space is now placed at the position where the image is inserted in the HTML where in the past, no extra space is inserted. As a result, extra spaces show up in strange places.
BUT THERE IS MORE! HERE IS THE HOWLER!
The HTML interface is now completely useless. Look at the image below. Typepad decided to eliminate all line breaks so the entire HTML now shows up in one big paragraph, making it impossible to edit at all.
This is how a previously great company shoots itself in its foot.
I'm open to suggestions for where I should move the blog to... (Assuming you can get the commenting function to work, because I just failed multiple times)
If you've been happy so far, you could probably just wait for them to react to the wave of bad publicity and fix things again. If not, there are tons of alternatives. The best is still to roll your own. With a decent CMS like Drupal, you can also structure your site much better than with a pure blog engine like this place has.
Posted by: Robert Kosara | May 28, 2008 at 10:22 PM
FWIW, I've been happy with WordPress, running on my host not hosted on the WordPress.com site.
Posted by: Jon Peltier | May 29, 2008 at 07:32 AM
I understand that Wordpress running on wordpress.com is also good. And I've been more than satisfied with running it on my host. I'd say that using something like Drupal is maybe a bit overkill.
Posted by: Tom | May 29, 2008 at 11:53 AM
I'm on Wordpress.com, but the feature-set is somewhat limited compared to hosted Wordpress or other hosted solutions (e.g. no inclusion of any scripting). But I have found it easy to use and the end results seem to look pretty good.
Posted by: Sean Carmody | May 29, 2008 at 07:48 PM
Check out their posting about problems with Compose. File a help ticket.
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/follow-up-to-th.html
Posted by: Walter Underwood | May 30, 2008 at 04:57 PM
Looks like they broke their RSS feed too. It's about three posts behind.
Posted by: John S. | May 30, 2008 at 10:22 PM
Wordpress is awesome, you will love the flexibility compared with Typepad. If you need a hand moving across, let me know :)
Posted by: Rachel C | May 31, 2008 at 01:29 AM
Blogger. Works, fast, easy, adding new useful features all the time.
Posted by: Scott Willeke | May 31, 2008 at 04:17 AM
The last WordPress update really improved it. Punish TypePad, just switch.
Posted by: Jens | Jun 03, 2008 at 03:27 AM
I believe the best way is surely to purchase your own domain name & host space. After several times of disappointment, I did so :-)
Posted by: Yihui Xie | Jun 12, 2008 at 08:10 AM