Typepad

The book I read to research this post was Typepad For Dummies by Melanie Nelson et al which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. Typepad came about as a blogging engine developed for someone’s blog which they realised there was demand for and formed a company called Six Apart. The company name is because the couple had their birthdays 6 days apart but anyway it has become a popular blogging service that can be either hosted or self hosted by a company like Go Daddy for which there is a version called Movable Type which is similar in terms of features and the software itself is free. Typepad is particularly good in that it is configurable especially in the Movable Type version and as in a lot of blogging programs is composed of modules. In the Typepad version you can configure it in HTML. In the other version there are other programming languages like Python you can use. This book is a little bit out of date being written in 2010 but does include the substantial upgrade to Typepad in 2009. The biggest upgrade of features to date. There is a basic free option where you get a single blog with 3 GB of space and various paid options which also let you have a customized URL among other things. This is a very good and interesting book I enjoyed reading. In the basic version you are stuck with one theme called Chroma. I think Typepad is better suited to business blogs than personal blogs but it does have various social media modules so you can integrate it with the various sites. In particular there is a friendfeed module which even informs followers of your activity on Amazon. You can do podcasts although due to the increased space involved will probably need a paid membership. I must admit I’d probably have no need to use Typepad but I do find books about the different platforms quite interesting.