Le Danois

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Typepad vs Blogger

So I have included the new Blogger commenting system in the blog, which reminds me that I never got around to writing down my experiences testing Typepad. I first paid attention to Typepad when Joi Ito announced that a French version had been launched. The fact that they were spreading their deployments like wildfire sort of indicated that a lot of effort had been put into and is still being put into the Typepad product. Despite the fact that the post that got me interested in Typepad was related to the launch of the French version, I chose to signup for a 30 days test drive on typepad.com.

I have been a Blogger user for two years and I am currently running my second Blogger blog. I have all in all been very happy with the Blogger service and the only reason for looking at other similar services were:
- I was interested in getting a commenting system that is integrated with the rest of the blog
- I wanted to see what I was missing out on

So after having played around with Typepad for about a week or so, I have the following conclusions:

What's positive for Typepad
- The commenting system works as it should (not pop-up and anyone can comment)
- Moblog functionality
- Extra features such as a calendar component, trackback, etc.
- Most of the components you'll need for an up-to-date weblog is provided by the solution

What's negative for Typepad:
- You cannot have the latest photo from your moblog on your blog page (it just keeps the first photo)
- The calendar does not allow browsing through the months or years which makes it useless in my opinion
- I need access to the HTML since I need to add non-standard stuff to my blog and access to the files requires the most expensive subscription. I don't really feel like I use a lot of their functionality, but I still end up in their most expensive category of users
- Some texts seem to be integrated in their components, such as the heading text for photo categories component. I don't know whether this can be modified
- At times the administration site seems quite slow.
- The statistics are useless

Basically I would not currently get a lot out of switching to Typepad and I would have to start paying for having my weblog. I am not at all against paying (I used to pay for blogger and I payed for the commenting solution), but going from something that's free to something that is not, without getting any extra features, is just stupid.

So the conclusion is that I'll stick with Blogger for now, but I really hope that they will focus on the following:
- Fix the bugs related to publishing with Mozilla Firebird
- Change the commenting so that non-Blogger users are not discouraged from leaving comments

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