Blogging Tools Suck

It has to be said by someone and I haven't heard anyone saying it.

I use TypePad. For everyday posting, it's not bad. It's been a bit slow for the past several months, but I attribute that to growing pains and scaling issues. That's not terribly troubling to me. I figured they'll get that part fixed soon enough.

What really sucks is the integration between TypePad (or any other hosted blogging platform) and the other services that bloggers need. Here is a list of things I'd like to be tightly integrated with my blogging platform whether its Typepad or anything else.

Google AdSense (or some other advertising service)
Google WebSearch (or some other site search/web search service)
Bloglet (or some other email subscription service)
Technorati (or some other service to see who is linking to my blog)
SiteMeter (or some other service that tells me how many visitors and page views I get)
Feedburner (or some other service that tells me who is reading my feed)

I've turned on a number of people to TypePad over the past couple months. Not because TypePad is great, but because it sucks less (as Brad Feld likes to say). Every single one of these people has immediately asked me how to do all or most of the above. To my knowledge, there isn't a hosted blogging service that comes with any of this built in. Why not? I have no idea.

Even though the last one on my list is Feedburner integration, it's at the top of my personal priority list for the following reason. I did not switch to Feedburner until I was about 9 months into this blogging thing. There are still a lot of people using my original Typepad feed and I have no idea who they are or what they are reading. I need that fixed. Please TypePad, integrate with Feedburner and let me redirect the feed to them. Then after you do that, go intergrate the rest of this stuff.

Now that Andrew Anker has joined TypePad, maybe he can help make this stuff happen. Someone has to.

Comments

[Peter Caputae]

while you are at it, i want to read my blogs (bloglines) in the same place i publish, and i want a bookmark manager like del.ici.ous integrated.

maybe A VC should throw some money at someone to get this stuff integrated?

[Brendon J. Wilson]

If you're going to include Google AdWords in that list, you might as well include optimization for Amazon Associates ID (though Feedburner apparently does this, but only for the feed, not the static content in your archives).

For that matter, it should actually go beyond that - Google Adwords or some other affiliates program ID should really get integrated into the content of an entry. For example, if I'm talking about some product or the other, then my blog client should scan the text for products, auto-insert links (perhaps in a different CSS style to differentiate them) with the appropriate referral IDs (Amazon, Google Adwords, Barnes & Noble, etc). If someone clicks through the link and buys, then I should get a cut; if they buy something other than the item to which I directly linked, I should get a reduced cut, just like the Amazon Associates program, except without requiring me to troll through the Amazon database and manually insert the links in my post.

[Matt Blumberg]

Oh, come on. Typepad sucks, too. It's not just that it sucks less than the other ones. It's missing all sorts of basics of UI design and is still very much a tool for geeks or for people who are completely happy with a vanilla offering. I use Typepad as well and have offered to give them feedback on the UI whenever they want it.

[Randy Charles Morin]

Try, the Dude. http://www.dudecheckthisout.com

[EsmeV]

All of these stripped down versions of a full-blown blogging engine suffer from the same limitations. That's why I don't use them. I want my blog to look a certain way and want it to be tailored exactly to my tastes. I use Movable Type and like it for that reason, but would not recommend it to just anyone. The installation is a nightmare. The documentation is pathetic. I tweaked it so that my site, Muniwireless.com, does not look like a diary, but rather like a news site. My husband uses Word Press now and what I like most about Word Press is the Comments RSS and the fact that you don't need to rebuild pages every time you change a part of the template.

[Brendon J. WIlson]

Oh, and one more thing: for the love of God, can someone please integrate a spell-checker into the various blogging tools? I know, I know - maybe it would take away from the "intimacy" of blog posts - but I find rampant spelling errors and bad grammar really detract from the quality of conversations on blogs: "Its a lot easier for people to discount what your saying when you're post is magnled by bad grammer and spellnig".

[Will Pate]

Case in point - every time I re-save my post it sends you a new trackback ping, even if I rip out your trackback URL to ping.

[Anil]

A few points. First, Fred, thanks for the feedback. At the time TypePad was created, nobody had integrated stats and trackback and comments and photo albums and moblogging and drag-and-drop designing all into one blog app. I'm pretty sure almost nobody else still has gotten all those pieces, but the bigger point is that integrating all of them was definitely a goal, and it's a path that makes sense.

To address some of the comments, TypePad's not a stripped-down version of Movable Type, it's a different sort of application. No setup required, but you can still go all the way up to TypePad Pro and edit templates directly and have that sort of fine-grained control if you want.

I think the experience with Movable Type, for that matter, is improving, especially with the addition of support directly from us. File a help ticket for Movable Type and you'll get an answer from our support team, just like you do with TypePad. That should help people who find any part of the process confusing. And you can still just buy an installation from us.

THe nice thing is that we've got people that care enough to give us this kind of specific feedback. We're taking notes. :)

[Alan]

Its just a shame that this post comes over as a generalisation of all blogging tools. Had you checked out Blog-City, you would find all of the items you listed (except GoogleAdSense, although it does have AmazonID). It also has a whole host of extra goodies, including the ability to post from AIM, Email or your mobile phone.

[brewdog]

There are a lot of good points being made, and I'm still learning TypePad's finer points after blogging heavily for the past month on it. I've used other tools (like Blogger and pMachine) and I've taught workshops to students and teachers on how to blog.

For me, the most important thing is my content. It's my voice, my words, my links to other people that matter most. The rest is gravy.

Yes, I love the fact that I figured out how to get AdSense to show up in my basic template and how I was able to switch TypePad's XML feed with Feedburner. As someone who's been building webpages since 1995, these are academic exercises to me.

What I like even better is knowing that people read my words. That the Finnegans Wake Page A Day project is being used. I mean, I use TypePad pages for my own little projects (I have one I use to link to Internet Radio Playlist feeds in pop-up windows) that aren't out there for anyone else but me. In almost 10 years, I've gone through a variety of tools and TypePad does a good job working as a foundation. No, it's not perfect, but I feel they're going in the right direction.

[Nik Cubrilovic]

Will - the fact that it pings this post again, and adds a trackback entry every time you save your post shows that the application is not perfect. I would have expected that a simple bug like that would have been cleared up pre-release! Is it something that you are doing?

[Anil]

For reference, Will's on MT2.64, a version which was released more than a year ago. Current versions won't repeatedly ping the same post.

[Carthik]

Try WordPress. A lot of the functions you need are already available over at wordpress as plugins, and if there isn't one readily available, I am sure some of the users will hack one up for you.

You can migrate from MT/Typepad over to wordpress in a breeze, too.

[Will Pate]

Ah, thanks for letting me know, Anil. I was wondering why that was happening :)

[Alec]

Typepad is a nightmare, especially domain mapping. Plan to spend either many hours fighting with your registrar to get it right or to spend $25/domain to have some florid geek in Pennsylvania fix it for you.

Don't expect any kind of decent support from Typepad. It has been a terrible experience. Expensive and bad.

[Yves]

Personally, I use wordpress on my own server, but there are always free and good alternatives, such as fu-gu.com.
(And z-names.com for the cheap domain names)

Have a look.
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