Category: Products

Everything TypePad announcesthree new features for TypePad, namely additional sorting options for TypeLists (blogroll-like lists), the ability to upload a zipped folder of photos (a vast improvement over the tedious, one-at-a-time 15-at-most original method), and the ability to password-protect your entire TypePad site. (via Buzzmachine)

Been busy holidayin’ and doing other stuff lately, so a lot of the basic substrate of blog news and blog gossip is passing unremarked. By now, most MT users probably know that Movable Type is vulnerable as an open spam relay. If you are not using the “mail this entry” feature, it is highly recommended…

Anyone who’s worked with UserTalk, Frontier, Manila, or Radio knows that there’s a lot of impressive power packed into these tools and also a lot of idiosyncrasies. The software is ideological in the sense that it reflects the choices and preferences and decisions of mainly one programmer and software architect, Dave Winer: In software your…

Jason Shellen’s got a hack that will add a Blogger bookmarklet-type button to the new Google Deskbar. Now, who will do the same for MovableType, Radio, pMachine, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, Lycos blogs, etc.? (phew!) [via BuzzMachine]

Andrew Grumet explains how to get started with multi-post publishing from Radio to Movable Type. I presume this would work with TypePad as well?

Scot Hacker reports some scaling problems with Movable Type. He’s noticed that his server is taking longer and longer to rebuild after each new post or comment. The comment problem leads to people double- or triple-posting in frustration. Thus far he’s found an unorthodox solution, but he’s mainly hoping that the speed/efficiency problems are solved…

A while back I took Dave Winer to task when he complained that Ev Williams was “disappearing” UserLand by not citing Radio as a major competitor to Blogger. In that context, I didn’t feel that Evan was obliged to rattle off an exhaustive list. However, today Dave is pointing to some evidence that Google is…

Brad DeLong quotes Kevin Drum (“What a mess. A combination of host problems and Movable Type fragility wiped out my site for the entire day. I’d bore you with all the details, but I’m too pissed off right now to write about it. … Also, all my permalinks changed during the reconstruction process, so if…

Responding to Andrew “I hate blogs and obsess about little else” Orlowski’s latest screed at the Register, which blamed Six Apart for ruining Google by inventing Trackback, Mena writes in Six Log that it’s a better practice to include trackbacks (and comments) on the same page as the weblog entry they refer to than to…

Rogers Cadenhead writes: I’ve received a few e-mails from readers wondering when they’ll be getting Radio UserLand Kick Start, which comes out this month. I checked with my publisher, and it appears they’ll be shipped from the Sams Publishing warehouse to Amazon.Com this week. [Workbench] I’m looking forward to it! Radio is crying out for…

I’ve been using Radio to run my Mediajunkie page after migrating this weblog to Movable Type, and I recently added Adsense ads from Google to the pages. I’d like to republish the whole site to get the ads on to the archive pages, but the problems is that the first 1000 or so posts are…

I was doing a period check of very large files on my computer, planning to backup or remove the largest ones to make some room, and I noticed that among the top five files, four of them were .root files used by Radio: aggregatorData.root (149 megs) weblogData.root (128 megs) manilaBloggerBridgeData.root (79 meg) Radio.root (31 meg)…

The Salon blog community servers (hosted by UserLand) have been down since sometime Friday, which is frustrating for the Salon bloggers who rely on the community server to host their blogs (and their comments) and to track updates and traffic figures. As far as we can tell, UserLand is down to two (no-doubt overworked) employees,…

The Blog Herald reads about a panel at the upcoming Microsoft PDC conference and predicts that MS will roll out a blogging tool as part of MSN or SharePoint. SharePoint 2003 includes a “Web Log” web package for including a blog-like element in a SharePoint collaborative website, but it’s only semibakes from my perspective. MSN…

I was a little confused by the news announcements about the end of a fee-based Pro version of Blogger and folding in of most of the Blogger Pro feature set into free Blogger. I emailed Steve Jenson a few questions and, though he was on vacation at the time, he graciously passed them along to…

A reader just sent me a comment looking for a tutorial on how to add RSS to a weblog. I saw from his URL that he is a Xanga user (The Populist), so I went to the Xanga site looking for info about RSS or syndication support and didn’t find any. Does Xanga offer RSS…

According to Ev, Blogger Pro’s features will be folded into the free version of Blogger. Ev: “Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the web.” Susan Mernit asks these questions about the announcement: Is this the rich company Microsoft-like tactic of offering a free product that…

According to a message from Evan Williamson the BloggerDev mailing list, Blogger is being subjected to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack right now.

OK, I think the reason why my Mediajunkie page hasn’t been upstreaming is that my year-long Radio license must have expired. What I’d like to know is why I wasn’t automatically invited to renew it when the time was up? Doesn’t UserLand want my money? Anyway, I did just re-up for another year, mainly for…

Salon blogger Rayne Today has been trying out the AOL Journals feature and has some criticisms to share. UPDATE: Rayne Today has also posted further comments about problems with AOL’s approach to blogs (The Clone War Quagmire and earlier entries).