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UPDATE: 7/3/05: So much for good handling of TrackBack spam - some jerk has been bombarding me with hundreds of really offensive trackback spams across all of my TypePad blogs and I’ve had to manually delete them all (and keep doing it every 10 minutes). What happened TypePad guys???

Just wanted to note how impressed I’ve been with how TypePad has been handling Comment and TrackBack spam.  I’ve got my blog set to email me whenever there is a new comment or trackback, and every time I get a notification of a new comment/trackback which is clearly spam, by the time I’ve logged into TypePad, the spam has already been automatically removed from my blog.  Very nice.

Link: News - HaloScan.com.

Trackback and commenting go hand in hand, especially in the weblog community, but unfortunately, there hasn’t been an easy way for Blogger, Blogspot, Diaryland, Diary-X, iBlog, Newspro, Pitas, and many other weblog users to implement trackback capabilities until now.

HaloScan fills this need by providing you not only with the (free) commenting services we have provided for the last one and half years, but also easy, seamless integration of trackback services (both incoming and outgoing ping support) to all existing and future Haloscan members. All this at the unbeatable price of $0.00–FREE. Getting started requires minimal work–sign up, log in and follow the simple, two-step directions to install trackback and/or commenting into your weblog. We highly recommend that all existing and new users install both the commenting and trackback services but you can also install just one or the other as needed. If you have trouble with any part of this process, we’ll be glad to help! Also, be sure to send a trackback ping to this post if you install the trackback system or write about us in your weblog.

Hmmm — so many things on my plate, but I can’t wait to try out Blogger combined with HaloScan’s free remote commenting and trackback system. Could this make Blogger a true competitor to TypePad (or perhaps even superior - given that its FREE)?

I’ll post my findings soon!

Update: It’s not as simple as it seems. According to their tutorial on sending a trackback ping, each time you want to send a trackback from Blogger (or similar tool), you have to

1. login to HaloScan
2. click ‘Manage Trackback’
3. click ‘Send a trackback ping’
4. Paste the TrackBack ping URL into the edit box for ‘URLs to Ping’
5. Fill in your blog name
6. Paste YOUR permalink URL
7. Paste a copy of your Post Title
8. Paste (or write) an excerpt from your post
9. Click the ‘Ping Now’ button.

Yikes - that’s more work/typing/copying & pasting than I want to bother with.

There’s a thread in their forums about adding some code to your Blogger templates which enables auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs (something that tools like MovableType and TypePad already do), which, if it works, could save some time - but as you’ll see in the thread people have found it difficult to implement. Your mileage may vary.

Quickpost bookmarklets

• currently no ability to assign multiple categories to a post through the Quickpost window - this is desperately needed.
• I’m unable to drag and drop the QuickPost bookmarklet to my links list using IE 6 sp2 (although it works fine in Mozilla FireFox)

Pinging

• Does not allow the user to customize the list of where you want to ping (whereas MovableType and WordPress both do)
  • workaround: paste the huge list of places you should ping in the edit box for ‘Send a TrackBack to these addresses’. (Annoying because you need to do it for every post you create)

Compose Post interface - what I wish I could do without editing the HTML

• change fonts
• real blockquotes (indented on both sides)
• align text (left, right, centered, full justify)
• ability to easily seperate CODE from regular text (so that if I have a snippet of coding that is useful, it’s easy to show visitors how to reproduce it)

Built-in ‘Email this post to a friend’

• Blogger has it - why can’t TypePad? Viral Marketing is the best way of getting traffic to your blog - and if someone finds your post valuable enough to email it to a friend, that’s a great way of introducing a new visitor to your blog. I’ll see if I can find a third-party workaround for this, but in the meantime, TypePad is lacking this incredibly useful feature.

Lack of RSS Feeds for comments re: a specific post

• this is built into WordPress, and is extraordinarily useful when tracking posts the commented on, as well as posts that have an interesting discussion that you want to follow and you want notifications of when new comments are added
• alternatively, at a bare minimum, allow users to ’subscribe to a post’, where they are notified by e-mail when new comments appear…

Sharing Templates - make advanced templates distributable

• yes, typepad comes with a great supply largely easily customizable templates. But if you want to do any advanced template customization, you can kiss their easy-to-use interface goodbye because now you’re working straight with the code for good. But once you create your masterpiece of a template, you cannot even use it with other blogs within the same TypePad account without manually copying and pasting each and every file from the template set to the new blog. Once I’ve put all the work into customizing my templates, I’d like to be able to click a button to download the template set and then, on another blog, click a button to upload the template set. This would allow users to share advanced templates not only within a single TypePad account, but also to distribute them for use by other typepad users

As I create more posts, I’ve realized that my blog can be difficult to navigate for the newbie. I wanted to add the ability to search through all my posts (why is this not a built in feature in TypePad??), and, through the help of Jamie Jamison, finally implemented search on my site.

Want it on your TypePad blog, too? Here’s whatcha gotta do.

1. go to Google Free Site Search and create an account
2. in the customize section, enter the domain of your website (in my case, blogging.typepad.com)
3. click Update to get the code that google generates for you
4. Now you’ll need to make a few modifications to that code so that it displays properly in your TypePad blog:
   • Change the line of code that reads:

   • to instead read
   • AND change the line that reads:
     • %(domain)s %(domain)s
   • to instead read:
     • yourdomainnamegoeshere
     • (obviously, replace ‘yourdomainnamegoeshere’ with your actual domain or site name)
5. create a typelist called search and paste the modified Google code for the search box right into the notes section of the only item in the list.
6. Make sure the notes are set to display as text,
7. add the typelist to the sidebar of your blog in the regular interface wherever you want it to appear (In the design section, first go to content and check the typelist, then go to order and position the searchbox where you want it to go.

People can now easily search all of your posts for the info they’re looking for, rather than having to hunt through your archives. Nice. Thanks Jamie!

It’s funny — TypePad itself gives you the ability to search through all of your own posts when you are managing your weblog — don’t they realize the usefulness of this feature for blog visitors as well? If I worked for Six Apart, I’d be making blog search a standard part of the template set, AND add a radio box for searching other typepad blogs, rather than forcing people to use a third-party tool (Google) to do it — this would keep visitors on TypePad sites and promotes other TypePad sites as well. Oh well — thanks to Jamie and Google, at least we now have a way to add a search box to our blogs even w/o the help of Six Apart.

Is it just me or is it incredibly annoying that whenever your TypePad post spans more than one category, you have to first choose ‘Assign Multiple Categories’ from the drop-down box, only to have a window pop-up (which may be blocked by your popup blocker — if so, try holding down the ctrl key whilst clicking ‘assign multiple categories) in which you can then use the ctrl or shift keys to highlight multiple categories.

Maybe I’m being petty, but every single one of my posts falls into multiple categories, and I absolutely hate having to go through this tedious extra step of popping open a new window in order to ctrl-click on the categories. Unnecessary extra steps in user interfaces bug me - especially when its a feaure I use regularly. I sure wish TypePad could handle categories with the grace that WordPress does. Just check the checkboxes along the right side of the screen for each pertinent category and you’re good to go. (Nevermind the bonus that WordPress allows you to have subcategories).