Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad
June 13th, 2008
There is a followup post here that goes into quite a bit more detail. If you are interested in this topic I recommend you read both, as well as take the time to go through the comments. There is some excellent back and forth on the benefits and downsides of each.
As someone who manages several blogs, some on TypePad and some on WordPress, I find myself in a rather unique position to comment on both. I won’t lie- I am clearly biased towards the latter, and though my opinion might be colored by that bias I’ve tried to figure out why I feel the way I do. I’ve outlined a few points below on areas where I feel that WordPress is clearly superior to TypePad.
Feature Implementation
If you look at a strict feature list of each system, it seems like while there are a few tradeoffs, the two systems are effectively equivalent. This is not entirely the case- hosting on TypePad gives you a series of admin forms that… well, don’t really feel like admin forms. Figuring out where all the customization settings are is almost as much effort as the customization itself, and no real thought has been put into UX or context. To contrast, the new WordPress UI has clearly received quite a bit of love from people who aren’t developers: The design is clean, management and updating is easy, the help files are easily found and concise, and if a particular feature is implemented it is done so in a way that covers 95% of your use cases. In other words, it’s a much cleaner experience.
URLs
This is perhaps my biggest issue with TypePad, and is best illustrated via the following samples. Please place close attention on the URL’s themselves.
Sample in Typepad
- Root URL: http://www.cuteoverload.com/
- Article URL: http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/06/rule-of-cutenes.html
Sample in Wordpress
- Root URL: http://www.flashenabledblog.com/
- Article URL: http://www.flashenabledblog.com/2008/06/12/tutorial-creating-a-downloader-for-youtube-with-flexair/
For Search Engine Optimization this is a deal breaker - on WordPress, the Search Engine Spiders see all of your articles under your domain. On TypePad, they see a single page linking off to a bunch of pages on typepad.com. In other words, TypePad gets SEO credit for your content. Note that this is a double-edged sword: by having your content on TypePad you get a small automatic SEO boost simply because you’re affiliated with them, yet the tradeoff is that you’re far more likely to get lost in the noise.
User Registration
On Wordpress, anyone can register and comment, and they get a handy dashboard once they do. On TypePad this is not the case- even if you’re logged in as a user on TypePad, you will still be prompted to sign in to TypeKey to be able to retain your identity across blogs and comments. On top of that, your registrants will be bombarded with requests to start their own blog, and while my marketing side can appreciate the cross-sell opportunity, the user in me finds it incredibly obnoxious.
Extensibility
This will probably not come into play unless you’re interested in hosting your own blog and/or have a developer mindset (like myself), but WordPress is simply easier to customize. Even if the metric fuckton of extensions and plugins doesn’t suit you (the kitten-a-day plugin is my personal favorite), the fact that the codebase is fully open sourced makes it easy for third party developers to generate their own. In contrast, TypePad itself is really not customizable at all, and Six Apart’s self-hosted solution Movable Type will cost you money. Admittedly, they do have a few plugins that are superior (Piknik for one), but given the ecosystem I expect an enterprising developer will meet and exceed them soon enough.
Upgrading
Sooner or later, you’re going to want to upgrade and leave your hosted solution for your own server. If you’re on Typepad, you will probably be looking at a variety of different solutions, including Movable Type (published by the same people who publish TypePad). If you’re on WordPress, you’ll probably be looking at… WordPress. Movable Type has licensing fees, and while they’ve made strides towards open-sourcing the core of their system they still retain IP control over the real juicy bits. In contrast, WordPress is entirely free, and given that at this level the two systems are functionally equivalent, the upgrade path from WordPress.com to your own installation is much easier, cheaper, and builds on your existing system knowledge so you don’t have to learn everything over again (On top of the UX point I made above).
Furthermore, WordPress has an ace up its sleeve: WordPress Mu. This is the upgrade after the upgrade, where you become the host of other people’s blogs. The install is practically the same, the only difference is that now you’re in charge of the "WordPress.com" equivalent. While competing with them directly might not be the best option, this is an excellent system if you are interested in opening your own office to blogging. Anyone and everyone can create their own blog and retain their own author identity, while at the same time remaining associated with your company. OPENing up your office culture can be a boon in many different ways.
Michael, with a headline like that, I’d hope you were a little more fair in doing your research first. I work with the TypePad team, and hope you don’t mind if I offer a bit more explanation. To be fair, you have to compare the hosted services of TypePad and WordPress.com or the installed software of Movable Type and WordPress.org, or you’re comparing apples and oranges.
First, if you look at features on the hosted services, it’s not even close A quick glance reveals tons of features that are exclusive to TypePad. Anybody who’s paying attention to technology at all couldn’t have missed TypePad for iPhone showing up in Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s WWDC at the beginning of this week. But it’s not just that TypePad was first, and best, to bring blogging ot the iPhone, but that there are exclusive clients for the Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Nokia phones too. There’s TypePad AntiSpam built-in, which even WordPress users have told us provides better comment spam blocking than Akismet.
And if you want to make money? The only ads on WordPress.com are the ones Automattic puts onto your blog but hides from you if you’re logged in. You could even have ads for causes or companies you don’t support on your WordPress site, and not only would you not know it, you couldn’t turn them off without paying. On TypePad, the only way you have ads on your site is if you put them there to make money from them, and we’ll even help you do it. But there’s more to address your specific points…
You’re just plain inaccurate in regards to URLs. While Meg hasn’t set up Cute Overload in the way that you’d prefer, it’s absolutely possible to have whatever URLs you want for your site — take a look at Celebrity Babies:
* Root URL: http://www.celebrity-babies.com/
* Article URL: http://www.celebrity-babies.com/2008/06/scott-and-renee.html
I see this mistaken assertion made often enough about TypePad that I have to wonder if someone out there is deliberately misstating what the system can do. And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing: TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline. On WordPress.com, you’re kind of moving into a bad neighborhood — by their own admission, one-third of the blogs on WordPress.com are spam. You seem to know more than enough about SEO to know what that implies.
When it comes to user registration, there are also more options than you think.
On TypePad, you can make a password-protected blog, and share it with as many people as you want to grant access to. On WordPress.com, it’ll cost money if you want to invite more than a certain number of people to have passwords on your site.
Extensibility? Let’s talk about what normal people who aren’t PHP coders can do. On WordPress.com, you can have one of a handful of widgets, with stuff like a list of your recent posts. Of course TypePad has that, but it offers hundreds of widgets, with new ones coming online all the time. From email subscription systems to the local weather to services like Twitter and LinkedIn, you can only get the widgets you want on TypePad. Meanwhile, WordPress.com users can’t even put javascript on their own blogs.
And then, on upgrading, you’re wildly wrong. For self-hosted options, Movable Type is free, open source, and it’s just irresponsible to misrepresent the fact that MT is open source. And MT is dramatically more secure [link] than WordPress.org — and that’s according to the Department of Homeland Security’s own statistics. But of course, there’s no MT-MU, and that’s because MT was intelligently designed from its very first release almost seven years ago to support multiple blogs. It’s not a separate fork with its own set of plugins and themes. And it’s not just possible to host blogs for others with it, it’s the sort of thing that’s done on the scale of Major League Baseball offering free MT blogs to anyone who wants one [link].
Frankly, you seem to be comparing your experience with WordPress to an inaccurate impression of what TypePad and Movable Type can do. Sentencing your friend to a blog where he can’t run his own ads and his “upgrade” path is an ordeal of constant security problems that have been described as a “cancer” [link] by the same people who remove WordPress splogs from search engines, while denying him the ability to play with cool stuff like blogging on the iPhone seems, well, not very friendly. If you want to give TypePad a try to judge more fairly for yourself, please drop me a line, and you can check out what we’ve been up to with Movable Type at movabledemo.com.
Thanks for your comments, Anil, it’s good to see you taking interest in what the community has to say. Even so, I’m a little distraught by how often you’ve used media exposure and press releases to support your points. Lets see if I can pull out your counterpoints and address them.
I’ll accept this as a valid point as soon as mobile becomes a valid blogging environment. Frankly, I’d rather claw my eyes out than try to write on my iPhone.
Please provide a Citation for this? My own personal experience points to the contrary.
I have absolutely no problem with your point that it’s easier to plaster ads all over your TypePad blog than it is to do on WordPress. None whatsoever.
I have seen several TypePad blogs that properly handle permalinks. Unfortunately, the default instructions provided by Six Apart result in the behavior I’ve listed above, so it seems that your problem isn’t one of not supporting a particular feature, but one of improper documentation.
As with any free service, there will be many who set up spam sites. Yet since it’s far easier to get your domain working properly, this is a nonissue.
To be honest, I dislike the filtering options for each platform. If I want to conceal posts, I’ll go to LiveJournal- their grouping and friend filtering is superior to pretty much anything either WordPress or TypePad offers…unless you really want to hack your own.
TypePad has an existing framework by which third party providers can inject their widgets into your blog. I don’t call that extensible, especially when I have to tell my friends to go sign up for a host of other services to get their stuff the way they want it. At that point you’ve given up control of the user experience to the widget provider, which… well, how much do you trust them to stay in line with your UX?
You are using misleading statistics in the post you linked. The aggregate data provided by the Department of Homeland Security covers every version of each system and every third party plugin across the better part of a decade, without even taking into account the turnaround on getting them fixed. To be truly able to call MT more secure than WP, you will need to do a study on # reported vs. # fixed, features and plugins tested and the time it took to resolve a vulnerability.
Anything less is FUD.
Are you going on record to say that there is no feature difference between the Free Download and the "Movable Type Professional Pack" advertised at $100, which… lets see…"is an add-on for Movable Type 4.1 available exclusively to paid customers"?
No it isn’t. As soon as you want to make money off of it (as you pointed out above) or "support some kind of commercial endeavor", it’ll cost you. I’ve yet to pay for a single copy of WordPress.
…are a testament to a vibrant developer community and rapid security fixes. Moving on.
Forking the codebase is simply a different development strategy, which comes with benefits and drawbacks of its own. To call one better than another is misleading.
You never addressed my point about the upgrade cycle. You simply said that I’m wildly wrong, with no supported counters. Given that MT requires Perl, and WP requires PHP, I can certainly see why. While I love perl to death, the last thing I want to do is explain to a friend how to get their CGI’s installed. Upload, Unzip, Run is the most support I want to offer them.
Michael, I appreciate your take on comparing the two, especially since you emphasize the non-coder’s angle, taking the tweedledum versus tweedledee factor off the table.
But security is most decidedly an important issue, which in light of the ever lopsided battle against malware, criminal traders and the resulting (more visible) spam deluge deserves a more serious look than you suggest, in your rebuttal of Anil’s pointing to reported vulnerabilities since 2005.
On the original page what Anil wrote was simply this:
And the number of reported vulnerabilities in any of the given years for the two platforms are just what they are. There’s no mention of severity, there’s no statement toward turn-around time, and there’s no indication of how many zero-day exploits were among the given numbers.
With an angle as important for any blogger - if only from a liability and reputation point of view - as that of looking at the number of reported vulnerabilities as a yardstick, you can’t simply walk away from Anil’s comparison by merely pointing at the possibility that arcane vulnerabilities in obsolete / deprecated versions are included in those statistics.
Honestly, without looking any further for an explanation (at least in theory, Perl might benefit from its obscurity, compared to PHP’s raging and still increasing popularity) or any possible mitigating factors (e.g. the number of “core code” vulnerabilities versus those arising from plugins or other “popular” modifications) a statement that ninety-one reported security issues were reported since beginning of 2007 for WP, versus all of three for MT, is something that deserves a better riposte than sheer dismissal of the numbers. For me, a valid counter point might perhaps have been that WP is more “accessible” (and therefore more “prone” to unearthing problems) as an open source project, but that’s not the argument you present.
Personally, I’m certainly sympathetic toward - if not in plain agreement with - your other observations on an overall better consistency, coherence and user-concentric presentation of WP’s administration tasks, but let’s not pretend that a demonstrated lesser exposure of security issues is a whimsical argument, just to bypass a valid point, either.
[...] June 13, 2008Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad [...]
I’ll respond more fully on your new post, but “I have absolutely no problem with your point that it’s easier to plaster ads all over your TypePad blog than it is to do on WordPress. None whatsoever.” is a little misleading — it’s more accurate to say that on TypePad, you *don’t* have to have ads, while on WordPress.com, you have no choice about the fact your blogs will show someone else’s ads.
D’oh, hit “submit” too soon — “As soon as you want to make money off of [Movable Type] or “support some kind of commercial endeavor”, it’ll cost you.” is false. Movable Type is released under the GPL, and this sounds like the kind of FUD people use to scare others away from open source. It’s GPLed — I know you know what that means.
[...] Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad [...]
Michael,
Thank you for pointing out the differences and flaws in each platform. For me, this debate is important because it comes down to time. As a small business owner {A one-man show] time is of the essence. I have several Typepad blogs-websites, and ONE WP blog. I decided to get a WP blog, just to say to myself, “Ok. I have a WP blog, like a lot of other bloggers I know.
What a royal pain in the neck, that was. {Setting up a new WP blog}I had to buy a hosting service, and then spend hours learning how to upload-download, do PHP uploads, whatever. It took way too much time for me to set up. Thank goodness I found out about the automatic upgrade plug in. My first experience with upgrading to a newer version of WP, was a 2 day cluster-F_ _ _.
Anyway, I can add a new Typepad blog anytime, easily, and at the same time, have it be SEO friendly, quickly. In the past 2 months, I have made 3 new websites, and I redid the designs on one of my blogs, all without too much hassle. Actually, I am at the ppoint where I can put up a new website, in about 1.5 hours, that looks nice, and is ready to go. I use the word “website’ because Typepad, if used correctly, can be used for website building.
Bottom line, if one is a consultant or one person small business owner, who wears way too many hats to begin with, and he or she wants to get online fast, and do it right, Typepad is easier, more SEO friendly, and just more efficient for those of use who don’t have the time or desire to learn code, and all the fun stuff related to it.
Joel Libava, President
Franchise Selection Specialists Inc.
Cleveland, Ohio
Ouch, sounds like a pretty bad experience. If you ever try WP again, I’d suggest going with a host like Dreamhost or Media Temple which will handle both installs and upgrades for you.
I disagree, Joel! I couldn’t tell PHP from PCP, far less tell you what a “root directory” was, so the fact that I was able to install my self-hosted WP blog and design it as I wanted says everything about WP’s useability.
Two days!? Wow. I’m assuming you made the mistake most of us make on our first WP upgrade and didn’t read the sentence in the README that says “back up your wp-content folder.” I definitely hated life after the first time I messed that up. But still, that’s user error - the WP team did put it in the documentation.
This is incorrect. MT is licensed under the GPL just like WordPress. I don’t have to explain to you what that means. The software is absolutely the same. The Professional Pack you compare the open source code base to is a separate piece of software that comes along with paid support if you buy a license.
[...] Krotscheck has an interesting post called Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad, which apparently ruffled some feathers and elicited a pretty venomous response from a Six Apart [...]
As one of the (probably) millions who have installed WordPress on my server (three different domains) I can only support what has been said in the reply comment above. I’ve tried TypePad against WordPress and dumped it quickly as being too complex, too user-unfriendly and lacking in the necessary updates, improvements required to remain on top of the market place.
Anil’s comment strikes me as being more of a kneejerk reaction without proper forethought or satisfactory research, which is a shame but says more about the company and its marketing strategy than anything else.
[...] post called Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad, which apparently ruffled some feathers and elicited a pretty venomous response from a Six Apart Vice President. I guess is part of their new plan to “compete” but statements like “TypePad [...]
[...] Krotscheck has an interesting post called Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad, which apparently ruffled some feathers and elicited a pretty venomous response from a Six Apart [...]
[...] Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad Comparison of two of the leading blog engines in terms of SEO and usability. (tags: blogging internet movabletype wordpress typepad seo) This entry was written by Ryan J. Markel and posted on Tuesday, 17 June, 2008 at 07:34 and filed under links. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. [...]
[...] vs WordPresson Jun 17 Second round of a some chitchat at Krotscheck, where Anil Dashcommented in a quite bogus way about the goods and bads of WordPress against [...]
Id say thats round one to Wordpress, and the crowds scream “Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael”
[...] fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, speculation, wank Isn’t it strange how when you write an article slagging off TypePad and praising WordPress you are inevitably ‘honest’ and ‘insightful’, ‘interesting’ and [...]
This comment made me giggle out loud.
I find it somewhat amusing that you’re offhandedly taking a dig at TypePad for allowing their users to make money from their blogs by “plastering” it with ads when you don’t even address the fact that WordPress.com plasters AdSense all over user blogs and doesn’t even give them an option to disable it. It’s come to the point where some of the wiser users have needed to put disclaimers in their sidebars stating the ads are not theirs.
Making money from one’s blog is not evil, nor does it automatically make it a splog — otherwise WP.com would just be a large splog-farm. Except to those who can’t see the ads because if they can’t be seen, they must not exist.
Re WordPress.com SEO - that made me giggle too. Especially when you used a URL as an example. One thing you forgot to mention is that WP.com 302 (Temporarily) redirects the traffic when the WP.com URL equivalent is accessed.
If Automattic were truly concerned about SEO for the WP.com users, then those URLs would be 301 redirected to the domain name equivalent. Of course, this problem only comes up when someone starts out with a wp.com domain and then decides later to upgrade to domain mapping, but in my experience, that’s a large chunk of people.
And let’s not even discuss the linkfarm that is the WP.com tag cloud pages. That’s a deep murky sea of issues that aren’t entirely whitehat.
Oh, and if you have a large blog on WP.com and think about moving to WP.org, be prepared for a headache. It’s not as easy as one may think as I’ve heard of people complaining about incomplete export files from WP.com, missing comments, missing content, and a slew of other problems. Then when it comes time to import that content into WP.org, it’s another bear of a problem because their are file size limits. But, again, this wouldn’t affect the little guys too much, but it’s something to be aware of.
I’ve not used TypePad extensively, but I certainly didn’t care much for what little experience I did have with it, so, don’t think I’m a TypePad fanboy–just trying to point out a few inconsistencies.
-KB
–
great post, well researched and articulated, and great answer to the first comment.
blessings
gene
Michael Krotscheck has an interesting post called Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad, which apparently ruffled some feathers and elicited a pretty venomous response from a Six Apart Vice President. I guess is part of their new plan to “compete” but statements like “TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO” and “On WordPress.com, you’re kind of moving into a bad neighborhood — by their own admission, one-third of the blogs on WordPress.com are spam” don’t exactly lend credibility. Michael responded eloquently in a comment and then again in a follow-up post. Lloyd has jumped in with some specific facts on Typepad’s (lack of) SEO. In the meantime we just turned on sitemaps for everybody on WordPress.com, a popular user request.
This is a really basic question, but I run a really small site (2 in fact) on Wordpress.com and have never seen any google adsense ads on them. Where are they usually found?
Moo, take a look at http://wank.wordpress.com She’s made a number of posts showing them and discusses them and other issues at great length.
Michael, you appear to be getting confused between the downloadable version of wordpress and the hosted version located at wordpress.com. You seem to be mixing them together.
When I moved people from wordpress to MT, I’m able to dupe their permalinks without issue. No problem what so ever. I’m not able to say the same with moving from from MT to wordpress. Some folks like underscores instead of hyphens in their URLs and MT can deal with that. Wordpress can not except for with a plugin.
I note that you also forget to mention wordpress.com’s adverts on the backend for their services, something that Matt swore that he would never do and once called “stupid.” Heck, even the downloadable version of wordpress has that banner to browsehappy.com.
Wordpress.com is very much filled with splogs and reports on them go unanswered.
Oh, and yes, you can pay for wordpress. You’re not required to though, same as MT.
Anyone can report splogs here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:
http://wordpress.com/report-spam/
Reports are read by humans and acted on as soon as possible, we don’t want that junk on WordPress.com any more than you want to look at it.
And anyone can click on that link up there and see that splogs reported are still online at wp.com more than 14 days later.
Come on, Matt. Please don’t try your PR spin when it’s easy to prove you wrong.
Um, how did you prove it?
I clicked on the link and saw nothing other than reporting link. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’ve seen you post a number of things in response to Matt and other Wordpress-related posts other places and it looks like you’ve got an axe to grind to me. So, until you actually prove it with screen shots and date stamps, it just looks like someone yelling “you suck” at a celebrity who won’t stop for a picture to me.
Sorry.
[...] Friends don’t let friends use TypePad [...]
Joel (Libava): if installing Wordpress proved difficult for you at the web host, maybe you should have tried one of the many hosts that provide simplified installers for it instead, like Dreamhost or the millions of CPanel + Fanastico hosts? Dreamhost now even has an even more simplified installer where *they* take care of all of the files for you, no need to fuss with updates again.
Wordpress v Typepad…
Friends don’t let friends use Typepad – thus proclaims one (Wordpress) blogger: As someone who manages several blogs, some on TypePad and some on WordPress, I find myself in a rather unique position to comment on both. I won’t lie- I am clearly bia…
[...] Posted on June 18, 2008 by canadatoday Friends don’t let friends use Typepad – thus proclaims one (WordPress) [...]
thanks God i use wordpress ..
[...] another WordPress vs TypePad discussion. This time its Krotscheck that has a couple of posts about this topic. As usual the regular “bunch” has left their comments on one [...]
[...] you ask? Because they are two different things. It is posts like this which I think are stupid as WordPress.org is a self hosted service and TypePad is hosted on TypePad [...]
@Dr. Mike Wendell: Thanks for the info! I’ll take a look at the site you suggested. Hopefully it will include some screenshots.
Another great blogging app that’s new (still in beta) is http://www.viviti.com - This is a bit of a shameless plug, as I’m the UI designer on the project, but really, it’s a terrific blogging app.
[...] dear WP Blogs. Plus while roaming around the WordPress’ Blogoshpere, I’ve bumped upon another post which caught the attention of Anil Dash, from Typad; which is yet another service common to [...]
You kids get off my lawn!
[...] read Marshall Krotscheck’s thoughts on WordPress.com and how it compared to TypePad. There’s a lot of back and forth, and a lot of chest bumping going on in that piece and in [...]
[...] WordPress vs. TypePad, Round 2. It’s titled “round 2? because in the previous post, Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad, Six Apart Vice President Anil Dash lead the comment parade with a comment that Michael felt was a [...]
I’ll jump in here and leave my 2 cents worth.
At first, I used Movable Type for my blogs, but I dropped it as many people did when Wordpress came out. Wordpress is GPL, and at the time, this wasn’t particularly important to me, but as time went on, I began to value this more and more. Upgrading Wordpress is a pain, and there are updates too frequent for my liking.
So, I moved to Wordpress.com — adding a domain name to the site was easy, and cheap. I didn’t like the restrictions and the pay structure of Wordpress.com, and when I realised it is run on a proprietary web server, I decided I needed to try and find an alternative.
Should I go back to self hosting? Yes. Should I go back to using Wordpress on my server? No.
Movable Type had gone GPL. Movable Type was free software now! Initially, I had some problems with configuration, getting things set up. But now I’m really happy using Movable Type.
There are some really good features in Movable Type:
* Static HTML — renders your blog as static HTML files on disk. I can’t express how much I love this.
* Multiple Blog by default — Wordpress MU. Meh. No thanks.
* Good set of themes by default — Wordpress needs to ship with some better themes.
* Infrequent upgrades — 150 or so days since the last security update to MT.
Problems with Movable Type for me:
* The name — ‘Movable Type Open Source’ is too long, and too confusing. Movable Type SHOULD be the name for the product. It shouldn’t be a different version, or different name for the free software version. I’ll admit I don’t like the term ‘open source’, which adds to this.
* Not enough themes out there — Wordpress has pwned MT on this.
* Too many confusing editing modes — Markdown, Textile, etc.
I’d like to see Wordpress address some of these. I’d like to see MT address them too.
What annoys me is what feels like name calling. It seems a little weighted on the MT side — far too much Wordpress bashing for my liking. Matt has been better about this, but I’ve seen a fair amount of it from both sides.
I’d like to see a service — Akismet or MT AntiSpam released as GPL, and soon. I want to run my own version for my own blogs. I don’t want to send all my comments to a third party.
I’d also like to see both projects contribute directly to getting good, up-to-date packages of their products into GNU/Linux distributions like Debian and Fedora. They’re already there, sure. Given the number of updates from Wordpress, they should be distributing their own Debian packages. Movable Type should do the same.
Run a repository, do it right.
Great timely post as I’m trying to decide if I should recommend Typepad over Wordpress to a client.
I run several Wordpress.org blogs, both installed on my own server as well as through a host that has 1-click install. I’m also working on some Typepad blogs, which I’ve done in the past.
My issue with Typepad is the lack of metadata customization without going into the custom templates. I LOVE the SEO plugins for Wordpress and the other plugin options.
While the idea of Typepad offering easy hosting is nice I’m worried about being stuck in the mode of having to go deep into editing code myself (which I’m not even sure is possible on a post by post basis) or having subpar SEO.
It’s a known fact that google ranks higher based on the first words in a title tag, and on a post TypePad puts the post title at the END of the title tag. Anil if you’re reading this, case TypePad do a quick fix on that?
Even from a bookmarking perspective it’s not user friendly to have blog title: post title
Good post Michael and good debate.
If Anil is following this then my experience of how Typepad handled a security flaw in their password implemention (reported to them over a year ago) makes me doubt that they take security seriously. They did nothing. At all. And have no plans to.
more here: http://bohanna.typepad.com/pureplay/2008/07/typepad-securit.html
keith
[...] no necesariamente las hospedadas en wordpress.com). A raíz de aquel artículo en TechCrunch, osé lamentar que se trivializara la cuestión de seguridad en un artículo del gran diseñador Michael Krotscheck. Para más inri, se enzarzaron en un [...]
[...] you ask? Because they are two different things. It is posts like this which I think are stupid as Wordpress.org is a self hosted service and TypePad is hosted on TypePad [...]
[...] triggered a post by Michael Krotscheck which alleged that TypePad, also a Six Apart service, essentially sucked. Anil went on to charge in [...]