Three Typepad Annoyances

I've always loved Typepad. I've never wanted to leave it, since I found it, and I don't plan to leave it now, but it's annoyances have gotten to me lately.

I don't even mean the RSS Feed glitch that is making the posts larger than life on most portals. That's annoying, but no one seems to fix it and in the end, well, I guess it makes the feed owner shut off Typepad blogs or people just put up with it. It's annoying that World of SL has a feed the displays typepad not with its "above the fold" first part, which would make a blog cut short and smaller to deal with, but dips down further into the "below the fold" part. I am not even going to bother to try to fight that because it's not doable, I guess, but just...annoying.

But I've developed a set of 3 pet peeves about Typepad that I feel I really need to publish and not just file as a "feedback" that will likely be ignored, or get a polite answer (they are very good with CS and politeness) but go nowhere. In part, I want to publish this so that others using Typepad can respond and explain whether anything *can* be done about these annoyances.

My third annoyance isn't common to Typepad alone -- I think most blog software is set up this way with this friggin annoying domain-name stuff. I guess there'd have to be access to some cloud server somewhere that would pull up an interface with all your blogs and whatnot everywhere to enable you to manage them. And no, OpenID isn't that, because that's cumbersome and doesn't work (paging Gwyn L, who has a blog where it never works for example).

Dear Typepad,

I'd like to outline for your developers 3 things that I find to be huge annoyances, that you really should consider changing in your service -- I'm sure others share these perceptions.

1. Cursor focus jump on italics and bold. This is the most frustrating thing about trying to prepare text for this blog that makes use of bolded headlines, italicized foreign terms, or bold/italic *anything*. Each time you go back in the text to highlight and bold or italicize or word or phrase, when you are finished, the cursor jumps back up to the start of the page. That compels you to go scrolling down annoyingly looking for the place in the text where you just were. Why can't the focus stay on the place where the action was implemented?! vBulletin, for example, when it works, enables you to bold and italicize and stay put at the line where you performed that action so you don't lose your way.

2. Forcing blog owner in comments through Captchas. It's not uncommon for me to face 3 Captcha challenges when I try to post a comment in response to other readers' comments on my own blog. This is insane. I own this blog. Why can't I post a comment on my own damn blog without jumping through captcha hoops? It captures my log-in and IP address presumably, what, it can't have an option to clear me always on comments? In fact, I'd love to have a circle of regular cleared readers who could always avoid the captcha nonsense, which I'm forced to put on because my blog does get a lot of obscenity and spam that has to be removed.

3. Forcing customers to buy multiple accounts just to be able to have a different address. I think I have 4 of the accounts now, just so that I can use the service for various purposes in different venues and get blogs that have different addresses. I can't put up with the limitations of having the one full-service most expensive account with unlimited blogs...because those "unlimited blogs" will all be stuck with the same name, i.e. Second Thoughts, when I need it to be SL Record or whatever.

Even if domain names have to be tied up like this, there ought to be a way for me as owner of 4 different addresses (that I had to generate by starting newly-named accounts) to log on to one control panel and control all my blogs (not just the sub-blogs on one name, but all my owned accounts). I really get sick and tired of having to constantly log in and out of the blogs, generating error messages constantly.

All of these annoyances are fixable. But they are fixable only by making customer ease of use a priority for development rather than other bells and whistles which constantly keep being put up these days from Typepad, to the detriment of focusing on usability. I actually found myself going and blogging more at another service lately just because *I am so friggin' tired* of these annoyances, especially the captcha and the loss of cursor focus.

Comments

[Alex]

3. is not true. You can have blogs in multiple domains under the 'unlimited number of blogs' account. Indeed you CAN map multiple domains to different blogs under THE SAME account, f.i. you can have www.whateveritmightbe.com and www.whateveritshouldbe.com etc. etc. blogs... under THE SAME TP account name.

[Prokofy Neva]

On typepad, no, there is no way to log into one page that shows ALL your blogs.

It shows your main blog and sub-blogs under that name, like Second Thoughts. But it can't show another account that you had to make under another name to generate a URL name (which isn't really a domain name, it's just a mask covering up whatever generic typepad has).

So no, you're wrong. Maybe other services enable you to log in and open up, say 10 different Live Journal accounts with different user names and log-in names if they are all yours under your information, but I sincerely doubt it.

So sure you can map what you want. But we're not talking about tekkies with their own servers and websites and programming and HTML skills.

We're talking about the simple for-dummy services that Typepad offers for its dummies. On that menu and template, I can't log in multiple log-ins. Indeed, they probably can't do that for security reasons.

[Alex]

Prokofy, I have this type of account.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Log-in. All of your blogs are in 'Weblogs' tab. You can create as many of them as you want by clicking 'Create a new weblog' (white on green, upper right corner).
2. Each of them can have a DIFFERENT/separate domain name assigned (maped) to it. I can ask my webmaster to write you the instruction if you need it.

We have 3 support sites built in the same TP account with different domain names.

You don't need to have many accounts. One 'unlimited' is enough for all your needs.

[Prokofy Neva]

Alex,

You're still not getting it, and you're not getting it because you imagine you know better.

I realize -- can I say this for the 3rd time now -- that I can access all my weblogs under one account -- I have probably 6 of them, most unused, under "Second Thoughts". So I have secondhtoughts.typepad.com/ravenglassrentals
or whatever.

I got all that, and any dummy can get that.

And duh, you can create as many as you want, and duh, I did that. Duh.

Now please pay attention because you have failed to do 3 times already, stuck with two problems: a) tekkie literalism b) superiority problem.

If I want a blog that says not Second Thoughts but SL Record, I'm stuck with having to *create a new account with that name that has a separate user name and log in*.

There is no workaround.

Otherwise I have to make a site using the weblogs area and "make as many as you want" that will look like this:

secondthoughts.typepad.com/slrecord
secondthoughts.typepad.com/whatever

But I want it to be:

slrecord.typepad.com

And that requires a whole new account, which I then have to pay for to get it to have that name.

Oh, sure, perhaps smart people with programming skills can remap stuff on the HTML templates or something, I have no idea.

But I'm an ordinary person using the regular instant templates, not mapping or anything of the sort. I'm making blogs that it generates.

And it can't generate to me three blogs:

secondthoughts.typepad.com
ravenglassrentals.typepad.com
slrecord.typepad.com

that I can access with ONE panel and one log in and user name, so that I can manage them all at once on one panel.

It's just that simple.

[Razrcut Brooks]

I think Alex was only trying to help and I saw now superiority complex in the above 2 comments. However, you know him better than I do.

My complaint with Typepad is "stay logged in for 2 weeks" never lasts 2 weeks. Anyway, I enjoy Second Thoughts and look forward to reading the new, RL oriented blog.

[Razrcut Brooks]

*no superiority (not "now" )

[Alex]

Oh! Oh! I understand what you mean now. Well... as I said you can do it with a little help of any web-master EXCEPT for the case when you want to stay within the 'typepad.com' second level domain. With other domain(s) (they are $5-6 per year a piece, btw) it can be done (with some professional help I guess).
Regards.

[Cosmetic Dentistry]

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