Mixed Media Templates Get an Upgrade!

It has been busy at Six Apart, and while we had to deal with a little hiccup this past week, we wouldn't want the week to go by without some good news to report as well. Last night we released some major enhancements to Dave Shea's mixed media layouts making them less fragile, and substantially more compatible with all of the most popular web browsers available.

If you have never seen these special weblog layouts, and especially if you moblog or publish a lot of photos then you most certainly should check them out, as our mixed media layouts are ideal for displaying images and other multimedia content. If you need assistance updating your weblog with the new layouts, our help system has a great article to help you.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot... In our never-ending War on Comment Spam we rolled out a relatively minor change to our service that we expect to have a significant impact on the degree of comment spam our users are subjected to. Working with a number of thought leaders in the weblogging community, we are the first hosted weblogging solution to deploy the rel="nofollow" attribute in all of our comments and trackbacks. But perhaps more importantly, we have deployed this feature to the largest number of webloggers to date. To learn more about how a little change to your HTML could have a dramatic impact on comment spam, check out our post on Six Log.

Add Your Amazon Wish List to Your TypePad Weblog

In the spirit of the season, today we added a new feature to TypePad:  you can now share your Amazon Wish List with your readers and friends. Through the combined magic of TypePad and Amazon, with a few clicks you can have a selection of items from your Wish List appear in the sidebar of your weblog.  There’s no need to hunt down your cryptic thirteen digit Amazon Wish List identifer -- all you need is the email address that you've associated with your Wish List, and TypePad does all the work.

Follow these three simple steps, and in no time you'll have your Wish List enabled on your weblog...

1. Go to the Weblogs tab and click Edit Design for the blog on which you wish your Amazon wish list to appear. Then click on the “Content” link to enter the template Content area.
2. Scroll down to “Add Amazon Wish List” under “Your Sidebar Content.” Click the “Configure” link to follow the few easy steps to find your wish list on Amazon.com and set your preferences.
3. When you’re done, click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the Content configuration screen. 

It’s that simple!  Learn more about how to set up and configure your Wish List in our online documentation.  From all of us here at Six Apart, have a safe and happy holiday season!

Buy One Weblog, and Get One Free

Following our announcement last week, the TypePad team at Six Apart is happy to announce the release of our 2004 Holiday Promotions. Under the Buy One Get One Free promotion, subscribers who renew or upgrade their TypePad account for up to one year will also receive a one year subscription at the same level to give as a gift. Under the Give the Gift of TypePad promotion, existing TypePad subscribers are free to buy as many TypePad subscriptions as they wish at great holiday prices. One year subscriptions start at just $39; that's just $3.25 per month! They make great gifts for the kiddies... and grand-ma too.

To learn more about these special promotions, read our frequently asked questions.

Holiday Promotion Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How can I give a gift subscription?

A:  There are two ways to give a gift subscription.

1. You can renew your existing TypePad account on an annual basis.  When you renew, you will receive a free yearly subscription (at the same level) to give as a gift.
2. You can purchase a gift blog through our “Special Gift Pricing” offer.

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Q.  How much do the gift subscriptions cost?

A.  When you renew your TypePad subscription annually, the gift subscription is FREE. With TypePad’s “Special Gift Pricing” offer, a year of TypePad Basic is $39, a year of TypePad Plus is $69, and a year of TypePad Pro is $99.

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Q.  Can I purchase a gift subscription if I am not already TypePad subscriber?

A. No, this offer is only available to existing TypePad subscribers.

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Q.  How is the gift subscription delivered?

A.  The gift subscription can be delivered in one of two ways:  An email containing a certificate for the gift subscription can be delivered to the recipient. Or you can print a certificate for gift subscription and deliver your gift personally. 

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Q.  Can I give a gift subscription anonymously?

A.  Yes, you can give a gift subscription anonymously.

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Q.  How is the gift subscription redeemed?

A.  The certificate for gift subscription (both the printed and email versions) contains a redemption code for the recipient.  The recipient must visit http://www.typepad.com/redeem and enter their redemption code. 

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Q. What do I do if I want to purchase more than one gift blog?

A.  You can renew your subscription on an annual basis.  By renewing you will receive one free yearly subscription (at the same level) to give as a gift. You can only take advantage of the “Buy One, Give one” offer once.   If you would like to purchase more gift subscriptions, you are welcome to take advantage of our “Special Gift Pricing” as often as you wish.

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Q. Can I give a gift subscription to an existing TypePad user?

A.  Yes, a gift subscription may be given to an existing TypePad subscriber.  The gift recipient will be able to apply the months of the gift blog to their existing account.  If the level of the gift account differs from the recipient’s current level, then the dollar value of the gift will be applied to the recipients account.  The values of the “free” subscriptions are as follows: a year of TypePad Basic is $39, a year of TypePad Plus is $69, and a year of TypePad Pro is $99.

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Q. Can I purchase a gift subscription for myself?

A.  No, these offers are intended only to be used as gifts.  The gift subscriptions cannot be applied to the account that purchased the gift.

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Q.  If I am a monthly subscriber, can I still give the gift of a blog?

A.  Yes, you can give a free gift of a blog when you subscribe annually.  Otherwise, you can take advantage of our “Special Gift Pricing” offer.

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Q. Are gift subscriptions transferable?

A.  Yes, the gift subscription may be transferred to another recipient.  SixApart is not responsible for lost or stolen redemption codes gifts.

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Q. How long do I have to take advantage of this promotion?

A.  TypePad users have until January 15th, 2005 to take advantage of this holiday promotion.

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Q.  Where can I read the Terms of Use for these offers?

A.  The Terms of Use can be read at:

https://www.typepad.com/app-static/html/gifttos.html

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Q.  Where can I get answers if I have other questions not mentioned here?

A.  Existing TypePad customers should contact support through the TypePad Help Ticket System. All other users should contact Support at  http://www.typepad.com/site/contact/

Winter Themed Photo Album Templates Are Here!

We here at TypePad constantly seek to improve upon and add to our selection of design templates, and today we are happy to announce a new series of winter themed photo-album styles (Candy Cane, Elegant, Snowman, and Winter Wonderland). These new designs are perfect for the season, and are an excellent way to display your favorite snapshots from family gatherings, gift-opening extravaganzas, and ski trips.

To select one of the new templates, in Design, click on the "Style" link and choose a template from the pull-down menu. When you've found the one you like, click "Save Changes" and TypePad will apply the design to your album automatically.

Avoid the Malls: Give the Gift of a TypePad

For those of you not wanting to venture off into the mad post-Thanksgiving Holiday Shopping sprees in your local stores and malls, Six Apart has the perfect excuse for you to stay home, feast on Thanksgiving Day left-overs, and still get all of your holiday shopping done. Starting next week, TypePad customers will be able to visit TypePad.com and purchase “the gift of a TypePad” for anyone on their holiday shopping list at a special holiday promotional price. An annual subscription of our TypePad Basic, Plus and Pro services will be reduced to just $39, $69, and $99 respectively, allowing you to save up to 55% off a yearly subscription to be given as a gift to anyone you know.

But wait! That’s not all. For a limited time, TypePad customers can get a free TypePad subscription to give as a gift this season. Simply renew your subscription to TypePad on an annual basis, and you will receive a free yearly subscription (at the same level) to give to someone on your holiday shopping list this season.

We expect our weblogs to be flying off warehouse shelves, so after your Thanksgiving weekend run, don’t walk, to your computer in the other room and visit TypePad.com and take part in these special promotional offers… while supplies last!

New Photo Album Templates and Other Fixes

Today we've posted more than a dozen new photo album styles, including two new seasonal designs (Autumn Leaves and Autumn Harvest), designs that are perfect for showing off the new baby in the house (available in both blue and pink themes, of course), and some color scheme additions to our classic styles.  To explore the new styles and apply them to your photo album, simply click on the style link in "Design" and choose the style from the pull-down menu. When you've found the one you like, press "Save Changes" and TypePad will apply the new album design automatically.

Additionally, based on feedback from members we've made a few small enhancements and squashed some minor bugs.

• For weblogs that are not using an advanced template set, we've improved the stylesheet to reduce the likelihood of having images that are aligned to the left or right side of a post cause any wrapping display issues;
• For members utilizing our mixed media templates, we've fixed the issue where a photo uploaded into a post set to "draft" or set to publish at a future date would display in the "recent photos" area on the published weblog before the post was published;
• We've made the toolbar buttons for "begin quote" and "end quote" more obvious; and
• We've improved the stability of the spell checker, and made other small bug fixes to the rich text editor.

Thanks to all our members who continue to provide excellent feedback on the application; we truly appreciate all of your input!

Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added two new features to TypePad:

• Rich text editing, aka “WYSIWYG” (What You See is What You Get); and an
• Integrated spell checker.

One of our most important goals with TypePad is to make it easy and fun for you to add new content to your weblog. While some folks might enjoy writing "raw" HTML, we’ve been using rich text editing around the office for the last few weeks, and have found that it’s easier to write, review and edit posts before publishing them to our weblogs.

If you are just discovering TypePad sign-up for our free trial and see how fast and easy it is to create and maintain a professional looking weblog.

Rich text editing features
The rich text editor now supports...

• Common text formatting options like bold, italic, underline and everyone's my favorite, strikethrough;
• Sizing and coloring text, with a handy drop-down “web-safe” color palette that includes a history of your most recently selected colors;
• Bulleted lists, numbered lists and indented text;
• Easy insertion of links – to both email addresses and websites (after all, what would your weblog be without links?); and
• Inline preview of images -- you can preview how your image will appear in your post right inside the editor. (Of course, our “insert image” button continues to support image aligning, thumbnail creation and text wrapping.)

Spell check
In addition to rich text editing, we’ve also added an integrated spell checker. We currently support spell checking in English, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish. TypePad will automatically choose the appropriate spell check dictionary based on the language preference you’ve set for your weblog.

Rich text in QuickPost
We’ve upgraded TypePad’s QuickPost bookmarklet functionality to support WYSIWYG editing. If you’re using a TypePad bookmarklet already, your QuickPost screen will display a handy link that will lead you directly to simple instructions to replace your current QuickPost bookmarklet with a new-and-improved one with WYSIWYG support. If you don’t have a QuickPost bookmarklet, you can get one by clicking on the Weblogs tab, and then the "Set up QuickPost bookmarklet" link.

It’s the little things that matter
We’ve added a few refinements to help make writing and editing your weblog that much easier..

• We know you have a favorite chosen font for your blog. The font that you publish in is also the font that you edit in (note, however, that the editor will display a default font if you are a Pro user and publish with advanced templates);
• If you’re on a roll and need a bit more room in your editing area, just click on the "bigger" link in the lower right hand corner of the editing area, and it will expand automatically;
• Finally, if you’re a fan of hand-coding your own HTML, you can switch back and forth between the rich text “compose post” mode and an “Edit HTML” mode. Edits you make in one mode will be immediately reflected in the other. You can also disable rich text editing entirely, by clicking the “Customize the display of this page” link on any post editing screen.

Supported browsers
Rich text editing and spell check functionality are available in Internet Explorer 5.5 and above, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla 1.3 and above and Netscape 7.1 and above. We plan on adding support for Safari and Opera in the future.

But wait, there’s more!
We’ve also recently enhanced the TypePad File Manager. The File Manager now displays HTML and CSS files. This functionality, combined with your ability to create and rename folders, means you can now host your web content in addition to your weblog on your TypePad site.

We’re very excited about these enhancements, and hope you are too!  To learn more about these new features, visit help.typepad.com, where we've put together a page of tips on Rich Text Editing that has everything you need to know.

New Halloween Photo Album Styles

Two years in a row make it a TypePad tradition!

Just in time for this weekend's trick-or-treaters, we've posted two new Halloween-themed photo album styles for TypePad users to choose when customizing their photo albums. To apply either Halloween Witches or Halloween Pumpkins to your album of frightening photos, simply click on the style link in "Design" and choose the style from the pull-down menu. Press "Save Changes" and TypePad will apply the new album design automatically.

File Manager Enhancements and Other Fixes

This week we released an enhancement to the TypePad File Manager, and squashed a few minor bugs in different parts of the application.

Based on feedback from subscribers, we've made some enhancements to the TypePad File Manager, making it easier for you to upload and manage the extra content you're including in your TypePad weblog.

• You can now create new folders through the file manager. Before you were only able to upload files into existing folders; TypePad now allows you to create and name new folders to better organize your content and assets.
• We've made it easier to delete files in the file manager. You can now "check all" items with one click for bulk deletion, and also delete empty folders.
• We've added a quick and easy way for you to copy and paste a link to any item you've uploaded in the file manager. Just click on the link icon in the file listing, and TypePad will popup a window with a readymade link for you to insert into a weblog post.

One of the bugs we fixed corrects the issue where guest authors weren't able to set their own image display preferences when inserting images into posts. Guest authors can now choose to either accept the weblog's default settings for image display, or set a custom thumbnail size, text wrapping behavior and link behavior for that post.

Fighting Comment/Trackback Spam

Updated - We changed Typepad in a number of ways to help deal with Comment Spam. Many of you have recently found many unwanted messages on your blog posts. Dealing with these annoying and often offensive messages has become a major problem.

To help prevent this practice we recently implemented the following changes:

• Comment URLs, used by spammers to increase their search-engine rankings, are now linked indirectly. This removes one of the main reasons comment spammers spam.
• We are expanding our use of Blacklists to capture spam before it gets too widespread. We are retroactively removing spam from our database as we discover it.
• We attempt to find the originating hosts used to send comment spam, contacting ISPs and, if necessary, globally banning IPs from commenting.
• Comment Notification e-mail messages now contain a link to the comment management page.

This is all in addition to the open-proxy blocks we implemented recently, and the other comment management tools available to you.

We currently block thousands of Spam attempts a day, and will continue to do our best to keep it under control.

Update: As of July 2nd, 2004 blacklists are now applied to trackbacks and we began republishing entries that have been hit with spam.

Thanks!

Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004

To fix some routing issues that have caused slowness in the "Add me to your TypePad People List" feature, we're scheduling some network maintenance for the early morning of Saturday, June 12, 2004, from 12:00am to 2:00am Pacific time. During at least part of that time, TypePad-powered sites and TypePad itself will be down for maintenance. It's quite likely that the actual downtime will be much shorter, but we want to allow for any issues that may arise. Thanks for your patience!

Update, 1am: completed.

Update, 5:30am: we experienced some unscheduled downtime from about 3:30am-5:15am Pacific time on Saturday, June 12, 2004, which we believe to be tangentially related to the network maintenance above. We've now brought all of the systems back up, and we'll be monitoring the service closely for any problems.

Scheduled Downtime May 29, 2004

We apologize for the intermittent slow performance of TypePad web sites over the past 2-3 days. We're having some problems with our storage servers, so we're scheduling a hardware upgrade for the early morning of Saturday, May 29, 2004, from 12:00am to 2:00am Pacific time. During that time, TypePad-powered sites and TypePad itself will be down for maintenance. Thanks for your patience!

Update: completed.

TypePad Spain Launches

As promised in our announcement about TypePad France, we have now launched TypePad Spain. We'll be sending our current TypePad (US) subscribers located in Spain a message about how to take advantage of this localized service. If you're in Europe and are interested in using TypePad France or TypePad Spain and don't receive an email, please open a help ticket and we'll explain more about this process.

TypePad France

We're pleased to announce the launch of TypePad France. Thanks to the Ublog team (our exclusive agents in Europe) for helping us reach this milestone. We'll be adding additional localized functionality in the near future -- including recently updated lists limited to our French weblogs and photo albums. If you're a Francophone, sign up today.

We'll be launching Spanish next week, with other countries and languages to follow soon after.

File Manager, Moblogging for Basic and Improvements

We've introduced a number of new features to TypePad tonight. In particular, one of them, the File Manager, is a feature that will please many TypePad users.

We've also unveiled a new logo for TypePad, which we're very excited about! After months of the old logo (always intended to be temporary), it's refreshing to see the new logo, based on a lily pad, and which we see as emblematic of the community of subscribers that has been built around TypePad.

In the coming months, we're planning to roll out additional interface changes to make TypePad easier to use and more powerful and these new features and changes are the first steps in that direction.

File Manager

We've introduced a powerful File Manager that allows you to delete and manage files that you've uploaded, along with a streamlined interface for uploading new files into any of your folders. The File Manager is available for use for Basic, Plus, and Pro users (in "Control Panel > Files"). This allows your to delete files that you've uploaded to their account, navigate through the folder structure of your weblogs, and upload new files directly to anywhere in your account.

Insert Image/File into weblog posts

Looking for the old "Upload File" link in the Weblog tab? The "Weblog > Post > Upload File" functionality has been replaced with easier-to-use, and more dynamic, "Insert Image" and "Insert File" buttons for easily inserting images and files into posts. These changes allow you to insert an image or file directly into a post, rather than having to copy HTML into the post. The new interface also gives you additional options for the alignment of images, whether images are opened in popup windows, etc.

Moblogging for Basic Users

Moblogging functionality is now available to Basic users. Basic users now have access to the "Control Panel > Mobile Settings" screen in the Control Panel and have the ability to configure their mobile devices and email clients to post to TypePad.

China and TypePad

We have heard reports from some Chinese TypePad users that they can not access their public weblogs but can access the TypePad application. We've heard from some weblog readers in China that they are able to access TypePad weblogs.

We are pretty confident that there is not a technical reason on our end for the problems some Chinese users are having accessing their sites.

Frankly, because we are not in China, we can't be 100% sure of the exact cause and effects of the situation and to what degree our customers are being affected. I can say that we are trying to get to the bottom of this situation and trouble-shoot why some users aren't able to access their sites.

Now, if you're a TypePad user in China and are experiencing a problem accessing your site (or are in China are not having problems), please open a help ticket. Right now we don't have a definitive answer on what's going on, but it would help to know where exactly in China you're located. It may, in fact, be a regional issue.

Network Issues and Page Loads

Some TypePad subscribers are having trouble loading certain pages on TypePad-powered web sites. We don't know yet if this is a network problem outside of our own servers or something inside of our network, but our engineers are working hard to troubleshoot the problem.

If you're having a problem loading your TypePad web site, please fill out a Help Ticket, and we'll get in touch with you about providing a trace of your network path to ours. We've found that many users having trouble accessing sites tend to be on similar networks, so more network data would be helpful.

Update: As of March 15, 2004 11:00am Pacific time the problem has been solved. It turns out that it was a routing problem at Internap, our network provider, affecting only a certain percentage of network connections.

Thanks to all TypePad subscribers and their visitors for their patience! We'll be adding a network connection from another provider to add redundancy in the future.

Scheduled Downtime (March 6, 2004)

TypePad will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance on Saturday, March 6, 2004, from 12:00am to 12:30am Pacific time. We'll be installing more memory in our storage servers as part of our efforts to further improve their performance; we apologize for the inconvenience.

Performance Fixes

We've said it before, but this time we mean it: we have instituted a solid fix for the slow performance you've been seeing on TypePad-powered web sites.

A short history of the website sluggishness, and what we've done to fix it, follows.

February 24, 2004: a hard drive on our storage server crashed. Since the server was then compensating for the loss of that drive, website performance decreased. We diagnosed the problem as related to the crashed hard drive

February 26, 2004 (early morning): we replaced the faulty hard drive with a replacement, and after some intermittent sluggishness due to the software resynchronizing, the service settled into a problem-free weekend.

March 1, 2004: with a full Monday morning traffic load, the sluggishness returned, and it could no longer be attributed to the faulty hard drive. We devoted a team to working on diagnosing and solving the problem.

March 2, 2004 (late night): we added a Squid Web Proxy Cache onto our webservers to handle the large traffic we're receiving for popular TypePad-powered weblogs. Immediately, the performance on the web sites improved.

March 3, 2003: the caching servers are now handling about 50% of our traffic, and as you've probably seen, performance is still improving, and sites are actually loading faster than they were before the hardware problems last week.

Future: we'll continue to tweak the Squid caching to improve performance even more, and we have a hardware transition planned to replace our current storage servers with higher-performance machines. When we get nearer to this transition, we'll be sure to give abundant advance notice.

Thank you to all of our subscribers (and their visitors!) for your patience. We certainly can't promise perfection, but we hope that this example shows that we do strive for perfection, and that our standards for service are very high. As we mentioned in a previous post, all TypePad users will be given three (3) free days of service.

If you have any problems or questions, as always, feel free to send us a report or a message through a Help Ticket.

Intermittent Sluggishness

We are aware that TypePad is again being intermittently slow in serving pages.

We have a team working on diagnosing and resolving these issues right now and we expect to have an action plan that we'll be communicating to our users shortly. As I said previously, any performance issues are just not acceptable by Six Apart standards and we're going to make sure this is resolved in as timely and unobtrusive a matter as possible.

For users who've already opened help tickets, we'll be following up with this message. Please understand that when we know more information, you'll hear from us. Thanks again for your patience and understanding that with a successful service, there are sometimes short term growing pains. We hope to resolve these problems soon, we'll keep you informed and then return to the level quality that we've promised and you've come to expect.

Performance Problems Fixed

As we mentioned in the update to our last post, the new hardware was installed at 1:30am Pacific time. The synchronization process took longer than expected, but it completed at 11:30am Pacific time today, and website performance is now back to the normal responsiveness.

Thank you again for your patience, and as mentioned in the previous post, all TypePad users will be credited 3 days of free service.

Website Performance Update

Over the past twenty-four hours you may have noticed website sluggishness on TypePad-generated sites.

What happened?

The sluggishness was caused by a hardware issue on one of our storage servers. Because our systems are set up to be redundant, your web sites were never down, but performance was impacted. To fix it, we'll be replacing the faulty hard drive with a replacement, and we'll be working to strengthen our systems for further redundancy for the future.

What does this mean for existing TypePad users?

Because the sluggishness of the last 24 hours is not up to our standard of service for TypePad, we'll be crediting all TypePad accounts with 3 free days of service. If you're a trial user, your trial will be extended by 3 days; if you're a paying subscriber, your billing date will be extended by 3 days.

This credit will take place depending on your status (trial versus paying) as of March 5, 2004.

How is it being fixed?

Because we'd like to remedy this situation as soon as possible for our subscribers and their readers, we're planning for an unscheduled downtime. The hardware fix will require 30 minutes of downtime and is scheduled for 2:30-3:00 Pacific time today (February 25, 2004). To minimize downtime, we're preparing as many of the hardware updates as we can offline; because these are taking longer than expected, we're pushing back the downtime to 12-12:30am Pacific time.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding and, again, we apologize for this inconvenience.

Update: The downtime was actually from about 12:50-1:30am Pacific time. As of 1:30am TypePad is back up and running, and we've fixed the hardware problem. There may be some lingering slowness here and there over the next few hours as the new hardware synchronizes, but everything is back up and running, and we thank you again for your patience!

Website Sluggishness

We apologize for the sluggishness of TypePad-powered sites this morning, and we're working to resolve the hardware problem that's causing it. Thanks for your patience!

Mobile Announcements at DEMO 2004

Six Apart is participating in DEMO 2004, and this morning we made some big announcements regarding mobile features for TypePad. You can see some of these features in action at our DEMO or Bust! moblog.

The mobile features below will be released in a major update to TypePad within the next couple of weeks.

Posting Controls on Moblogs

Instead of just one email address that can post to the moblog, allow multiple authors to post, or allow anyone with access to email post with a Public Moblog (like the DEMO 2004 Moblog).

Audio Content

In addition to photos and text, audio content can now be sent to a moblog--perfect for annotating a photo while on vacation, or capturing the ambient sounds at a soccer game.

Palm Client

To make moblogging an even simpler process, we will be releasing a Palm client for posting photos and text to TypePad weblogs and moblogs, perfect for blogging from the road.

Custom Moblog Templates

You will be able to select from custom moblog-specific templates, optimized for the display of posts from mobile phones.

Better Weblog Integration

Photos sent from a mobile device are now resized if they are too wide for your weblog, providing a better viewing experience for your visitors, and you can include a number of the most recent photos sent to your moblog into the sidebar column of your weblog.

Moblogging Availability for All Levels

Moblog functionality will now be available to TypePad Basic users in addition to Plus and Pro.