I read with great interest Liza Sabater’s post about her Typepad Christmas Wish List. I thought I’d add my own wish list since she covered some, but by no means all, of my own wishes (all of which have been relayed to TP via Help tickets).
E-Mail Notification
First, I heartily agree with Liza’s gripe about TP’s lack of an e mail notification system. Why does Movable Type have such a feature (which people who know and use it say is marvelous) but TP not? I’d like to ask for a feature that the MT notification system does NOT include: allow a blog author or blog reader to sign up not only for notice of all blog post updates; but also for blog posts in specific Categories. If my reader is interested in Mideast Peace, why should he have to get a notice that I’ve updated my blog with a restaurant review?
Blog Site Ban
TP has a Comment Ban feature which prevents an unwanted commenter from leaving a comment on my blog. The ban feature uses the IP address to detect and disable access. But what if an unwanted commenter uses a different IP address to access my site? He can leave a comment.
Furthermore, why shouldn’t a blogger be able to deny an unwanted party access to their ENTIRE SITE (not just Comments)? Personally, one of Blogcritics.org’s site owners visited my site, left a nasty comment, AND copied and pasted one of my blog posts to his site. I’ve heard of other situations in which other web vandals have copied photographic images from sites and then passed the images off as their own. There’s too much junk going on on the web (and unfortunately in the blog world too) and we need tools to control some of it better. Site banning should be based on the URL of the unwanted visitor, not on IP.
Amazon.com Links Within Posts
Now, you can list Amazon.com products within your Typelists along with a jpg image. Why can’t you do the same within a post? I like to use Amazon.com books and records to illustrate reviews I’ve written in my blog. If I want to do this, I have to first create a Typelist entry, then go to my blog display and capture the hyperlink info and then go to the post and insert the hyperlink into it. All this should be automated as it is in Typelists.
Allow Posts with Html Code
If I’ve written a long essay in MS Word or any other word processing program which is code rich, there is no easy way to upload such an essay into a TP Post box while retaining the code. This is a tremendous drag when you have an 18 page essay and you have to go into the TP post box and add all the formatting manually. Another example, if you do mobile blogging say from your e mail program–why shouldn’t TP upload your e mail blog post with all the formatting intact? Now, TP strips all code and formatting out of such e mail-to-blog posts. If Blogger.com allows you to do this why can’t TP?
Ability to view & maintain files uploaded to TP’s server
If you upload lots of photo images (or any other files) to your TP blog via the TP server, you can’t view , maintain or delete them. This is a drag. And for someone who’s worried about trespassing the maximum memory capacity or bandwidth usage this could be a real problem. Thanks to the author of A Welch View, whose Typepad Christmas List trackbacked to my post AND reminded me of an important issue which I, & other TPers have brought up before with TP Help staff.
Personalize the New Post Screen
I may be getting old, but why do I feel that the longer I sit at my PC composing posts in those tiny TP Post boxes with the tiny font sizes, the blinder I get? Does TP want to be responsible for blinding its users? I’d like greater flexibility in configuring the New Post box. Allow larger font sizes and allow for increasing the box size.
Keyword Search of All TP Blogs
I’d like TP to increase our ability to interact with our fellow TP bloggers. Sure, there’s trackback, comments, TP UserGroup and countless other efforts to create community. But I’d like the ability to search all TP blogs via keyword search. I’d also like to be able to bring up a list of every TP blog that covers any particular category (say, Web-Tech).
TP photo blogs
Why are the photo blogs the orphan stepchild to the text blogs? The level of development, innovation and sophistication evident in the text blogs is not matched by the photo blogs. Just a few gripes:
1. you can only upload photos one at a time (no zip file uploads). If you have 50 images to upload you can only do a maximum of 15 (I believe) and the upload is much more likely to fail than if you uploaded one at a time.
2. horizontal images are squished so that they will fit into the photo gallery’s vertical default thumbnail display. I saw a few of my images mauled like this & decided I needed a better photo gallery software. I now use Pbase.com which has solved both of the issues above.