The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect living and working in Baltimore.

 

"I surf as much as I eat."

 

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10.11.12
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2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06
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Turning a new blog page



Well I'm still a bit groggy from the early hop out of bed, but I'm signed up and running over at TypePad. The URL is http://curiouslee.typepad.com/weblog/. I haven't decided how I'll make the change to TypePad in relation to this blog, so don't leave this space or my Hiptop Nation blog yet. I think I've been through 95% of the TypePad sign-up and author's interface and the experience was fluid and flawless.

Thank's so much Heidi (hope you're feeling better!) and Tim for offering the discount code.

I'm off to New York City for a quick visit to the IA Salon, which is at Carolyn's place in Brooklyn this month. If I set up mobile posting on my new TypePad blog correctly, you'll see some thoughts and photos from on the run. Otherwise, I'll be posting from one of the WiFi parks in Manhattan, or from home again tomorrow night.

posted 5:40 AM +

My desk tonight:

Digital Holy Place

posted 10:26 PM +

Anticipating TypePad

I've been eagerly following the daily dispatches at TypePad on the major features of their forthcoming hosted blogging service. The topics over the course of five days included: Template Builder, Moblogging, Photo Albums, TypeLists and Features and Pricing, which pretty much answered many of the questions I had. And on Monday at 11:59pm Pacific time, we (who weren't beta testers) get the chance to to test drive the system by signing up for the preview release.

In the last year, I've toyed around with switching from the largely stagnant (and periodically flaky) Blogger Pro service to an open source package installed on my own host even got as far as installing Grey Matter. But my attempts at switching got sidetracked in favor of just keeping up with the blog content itself as I have had progressively less free time in the last year to fiddle with the techy details of server-side installations and maintenance. In these weeks before I become a manager of the AARP.org web site, and with the coinciding arrival of our baby in November, I have been mulling over how to get some desirable site enhancements such as integrated Hiptop Nation (moblog) posts, comments and an online photo gallery cobbled together. I was about ready to hire someone to help me through the mess, but TypePad is looking like a one-stop solution.

If the TypePad launches relatively bug-free and withstands the onslaught of new signups, it should, in one fell swoop, consolidate and significantly enhance all my blogging activity with very little server-side fussing on my part. Here are a few thoughts on how I'll benefit from each of the features described last week:

• Template Builder — Since I would sign up for the Pro version of TypePad, I wouldn't be using the WYSIWYG Template Builder much, but it will be useful to quickly prototype new blogs. The Pro version does permit a high degree of customization of the templates, and that's where I'll be spending most of what little coding time I'll have to expend. Also, curiousLee will finally become standards compliant because I'll probably start my new page layout by hacking up one of TypePad's sample templates.
  
  
• Moblogging — As much as I love posting from on-the-move to Hiptop Nation, I sometimes create posts I'd like to mirror to curiousLee. With TypePad's support for e-mailing posts with photos attached, I'll be able to post to both blogs almost simultaneously. I'm hoping I'll be able to interleave my mobile posts with desktop posts, but format the two types of posts a little differently in the style sheet of the template.
  
  
• Photo Albums — The ability to easily post photo albums is obviously a huge feature for me. I've got over 30,000 digital photographs from the last three years that I'd like to edit down to several online photo albums. If you've been a follower of curiousLee, or have clicked through the archives, you've only seen a tiny sampling of my favorite images. I would have been faced with hacking in an add-on photo album module to Grey Matter or MovableType if I had stayed on the path of installing and maintaining my own system.
  
  What I'll want soon after some of my albums go up is a way to flag certain images to send to an online ordering system so people can buy prints. I'm sure I won't be the only one with this wish, and I'm hoping there will be user-contributed scripts to enable shopping cart capability or maybe TypePad itself will offer this in a Super-Pro version. I'd be shocked if there hasn't been some thinking in the TypePad team of approaching Kodak or Snapfish to integrate print ordering and fulfillment with TypePad photo albums. Checking around the web, I see that the photofinishing industry's standards and infrastructure partners have only recently been announced.
  
  
• TypeLists — Having TypePad's TypeLists tool to manage lists of the various types of media I consume will, for example, help consolidate all my links to books at Amazon. I'll also have a more convenient way to add to and manage a list of my favorite blogs and sites without having to register with yet another external service such as BlogRolling.
  
  TypeLists are touted as being the most unique feature of TypePad because of their ability to integrate with web services. If TypeLists can pass each item on your book list to Amazon's Web Services to offer your blog readers more information or the option to buy, this should be where I'll hope to see some integration with Kodak for ordering prints. I imagine being able to arbitrarily designate images to add to a "Purchase Prints" TypeList that will pass orders to Kodak. One can imagine hooking up TypeLists to TicketMaster, MapQuest, Travelocity, etc.
  
  
• Features and Pricing — Given my interest in all of the features of TypePad, the Pro offering, even at $149.00 for the first year, is a bargain when I think about all the time I will save hacking around on my server trying to add open source snippets of code to a self-installed blogging system.
  
  Under System Features, post importing and exporting is mentioned. I'm hoping this will be the ability to import an existing collection of archives from another blog system, in my case Blogger Pro. Of course, this raises a big issue around managing references to posts from elsewhere on the web. Initially, curiouslee would appear on TypePad as http://curiouslee.typepad.com/weblog/, and presumably I would take advantage of TypePad's domain mapping policy to translate this back to http://www.curiouslee.com/weblog/ by having my current registrar, Network Solutions, switch to TypePad's nameservers. My last contact with Network Solutions was a massive headache, and I'm not looking forward to switching again. A carefully-planned cutover strategy seems in order.

So if all goes well with the preview and golden master releases of TypePad, I am going to be kicking up some construction in both my virtual and real houses this fall. And Paulo, I might still need you for some coding.

posted 11:00 PM +

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past monthly...
2000: 10.11.12
2001: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.09.10.11.12
2002: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.09.10.11.12
2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06.07

 

 

 

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The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. [?]