Neil turner wrote a really cool article on his reasons for choosing MT over WordPress.

Some of the deciding factors for him were the better templates that Movable Type comes with (as well as the ease of editing them without having to know cascading style sheets and PHP), a larger base of existing plug-ins (for now) and better documentation.

I’m curious to see if MovableType has been (or will be) updated by Six Apart to improve it’s interface to allow for rich text editing (WYSIWYG publishing) and a spell checker like they’ve done with TypePad. As I already pay for my own dedicated server, I don’t like having to pay extra fees to host my TypePad site elsewhere, so if I could have typepad’s functionality and ease of use hosted on my own server, in the long run that’ll be more affordable for me.

If you’re hoping to make some extra cash from your blog, but all of your monetized links are in your sidebars or headers, etc, then you’re losing out when people view your blog from feed readers. Not so if you use Feedburner – now you can beef up your feed to integrate links to relevant products using your amazon associate ID, as well as further enhance your feed by splicing photos and links into it AND get stats on your traffic. VERY COOL!

Neil Turner has blogged about his experience with experimenting with Feedburner, and while his post doesn’t reference the ability to incorporate amazon links, he does show you how he’s spliced in his Flickr photostream.

Here’s how the service works:

FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD’s with your Pop Culture category, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts.

FeedBurner then leverages the latest 4.0 release of Amazon Web Services to match your posts to relevant Amazon content for that store, and FeedBurner transforms that link and content from Amazon Web Services into a simple linked GIF tied to your feed item.

Publishers have total control over which (if any) parts of their feed get amazon links, which amazon stores they want to map to their content, and how frequently they want these associate links to appear.

I’ve noticed that this blog has been picked up by google and has been getting a fair amount of traffic for terms like ‘blogger vs typepad’, ‘wordpress templates’, etc. That was fast! I wonder if having your site hosted on typepad is actually beneficial for your ranking to the point of making it the most appropriate blogging tool if your aim is to make any money with your blog (i.e., your blog has some commercial purpose)

What if you want to create a blog that wasn’t available to the general public?

I’ve been poking around in MovableType and WordPress, but haven’t yet discovered how to make your blog private on those platforms — I’d imagine you could password protect a directory by modifying the .htaccess files, but I’d like to see ability to make a blog private incorporated into the blog tools interface.

This is where TypePad excels. Simply create a new blog, and 1) mark it as private (which only stops them from listing your blog on the ‘Recently updated blogs’ lists ) and make sure the boxes for notifying third party services when you update your blog are unchecked AND then 2) go into the Control Panel and click the link that says ‘Password Protect a Site’ and then enter the shared username and password that you will provide to only those you want to access your blog — this allows you to limit access to your blog, or part of your blog, so that only you or those you choose can read your posts.

In Blogger, go to Settings | Basic, and make sure to pick ‘No’ from the dropdown box entitled ‘Add your Blog to our listings’. Note that A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select ‘No’ they will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet. As such, if you host your Blogger blog on their free hosting site, BlogSpot, from what I can tell you will not be able to keep your blog private or prevent it from being spidered and indexed by the search engines. If you’re very careful not to link to it from any external site, theres a chance it will never be found..but you’ve no guarantee of preventing unwanted eyes from reading your private blog. If you host your blog on your own ISP or web hosting provider and FTP your blogger pages to them, it’s conceivable that you could password protect the directory, again by modifying the .htaccess file.

Again, not having yet installed b2evolution or blosxom, I can’t comment on those platforms. However, I checked out blosxom’s website and it appears that they have several Blosxom plugins that you can use to password protect your site.

So, at this point, it would appear that TypePad is the only blogging software I have tested that allows you to make all or part of a blog private from within the TypePad control panel.

Update Ping Services
You can copy and paste these URIs into your blog service ping options screen (in WordPress, you do it by choosing Options > Writing > Update Services) with each URI on its own line. In MovableType you can add these URI’s to the list of where to ping by going to your configuration settings for notifications.

While TypePad doesn’t officially support customizing pings, there is a workaround, albeit a bit tedious – simply paste the list of URI’s into the box entitled ‘Send a TrackBack to these addresses’ in the edit post screen (yes, this means you need to do this for each and every post you create). If you don’t see the field for sending trackbacks, make sure you’re using the advanced or custom post editor by clicking the link on the create/edit post page entitled, ‘Customize the display of this page’ (it’s below the preview and save buttons).

Not surprisingly, Blogger doesn’t support customizing of pings and since they don’t support trackbacks either, I haven’t figured out a way to get this working on Blogger. I don’t yet have b2evolution or Blosxom blogs installed yet, so I’ve no idea whether they support pings or allow you to customize them..

Anyhow, here’s my comprehensive list of ping services to ping to tell them that you’ve updated your blog: