TypePad Widgets - A Day Late and a Dollar Short For Me

In June 2004, I wrote a post called Blogging Tools Suck.  At that point, I had been blogging about nine months and was getting increasingly frustrated with the hacking I had to do in TypePad to get other services integrated into my blog.

I asked for easy integration of things like Feedburner, Technorati, Adsense, Sitemeter, and Search.

Since then, I've learned how to edit the templates, put HTML and Javascript into my templates, and even play around with CSS. I really never wanted to learn all of that, but I had to in order to get everything working the way I want it to work.

Well almost two years later, TypePad has sort of answered my request with TypePad Widgets.  There are about thirty widgets right now including Feedburner, Indeed Jobroll, Indeed Job Search, Technorati, and Feedblitz - all services that I already have on my blog but had to get there the hard way.

The cool thing is that this is based on an open API so any web service that wants to integrate with TypePad can add a widget, just like Feeburner's Feed/Site Flare service.

Since I have most of the services that I want on my blog already that there are widgets for, I decided to use the Bunchball widget to add Pac Man to my blog sidebar.  Unfortunately TypePad Widgets doesn't support advanced templates yet.  And the very reason I converted to advanced templates in the first place was to integrate these kind of third party services.

Ouch, that hurts.

Comments

[Michael Sippey]

Fred -- of course, widgets were inspired by the kinds of things you've been doing with your blog, using advanced templates. We want to bring that richness with those tools to users without having to require them to convert to advanced templates. Users that are comfortable with templating languages are used to doing things like copying and pasting HTML and JavaScript.

What we want to do with the "out of the box" design functionality on TypePad is make it rich enough from a configuration, design and customization perspective that users can build very feature-rich blogs without needing to learn the templating language. The ability to add Custom CSS to override TypePad themes and Widgets are steps in that direction.

Here endeth the pitch. ;)

[Ivan Pope]

You say 'doesn't support Advance Templates yet', but Michael Sippey from TypePad, commenting over at Stowe Boyd's blog (http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2006/03/screwed_again_t.html#comments) implies that there is no plan to make them available for Advanced Templates:

"One of the goals of the widget program is to let people who aren't using Advanced Templates do great things with their blog. We'll be rolling out plenty of more widgets over the coming weeks, and we're excited about the developers who have expressed interest in the program.

We're committed to giving folks who aren't using Advanced Templates a tremendous level of control over their blog, so that they don't have to dive into the templating language."

I don't know if I'm right, but it doesn't look like SixApart are rushing to add this to Advanced Templates. On this I feel the same as you: I've put a lot of work into using Advanced Templates - and it's not exatly intuitive. Now I can't use various widgets without abandoning all the other goodies I've integrated. Sucks.

[Tom F]

Wow, you just described my experience and feelings EXACTLY. Why did it take so darn long for Six Apart to start doing this, I just don't get it. Is it because they are putting all their eggs in this "project comet" basket? Who knows.

Example. Look what happens to the page after you enter a comment with an error in the URL field. It's just awful. And the same goes for the comment page with moderation turned on--it's an ugly confusing thing.

[Jason Preston]

As a Wordpress user, I was amused and happy to see that WP has been doing widgets for about a month already, and made an official plugin available two days before TypePad launched their widget service.

I'm such a fan of open source.

Ps. I totally think comments should be live. There will be a spam solution someday, and for now you'll just have to "learn a little css" and delete the spamments for a while. But that's just my opinion as a commenter ;)

[Scott]

I spent some time researching the new widgets and came to the same conclusion that you did. This is a feature set I could have used before I spent hours upon hours learning the architecture and tweaking my templates myself. It sucks, but none of the widgets they offered really jumped out at me anyway.

[Al]

I agree. I think most of the widgets are unimpressive. They could have taken a different approach, which I outline at:

http://alsargent.typepad.com/personal/2006/03/typepad_widgets.html

[Anil]

Jason, it's probably worth noting that on TypePad, we've had features like listing your recent entries and being able to drag and drop your category list around since we launched 3 years ago, so those aren't considered widgets. On the other hand, I haven't seen anything except TypePad that lets you do things like the CafePress widget. Maybe the term's getting overloaded, but then again, I used to think that about the word "blog".

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