Duncan Rawlinson - Duncan.co

Typepad Sucks

Me: NO IT DOESN’T

Reader: So why is that the title of your post jackass?

Me: I want people looking for "Typepad sucks" to find out that they don’t suck.

The other day I wrote that I hated Typepad due to some frustration with their new features. How spoiled am I? They give me double the storage and double the bandwidth and I’m complaining about how it’s hard to do something that the new features weren’t really designed for. I’ve already deleted that post but it must have caught someone’s eye.

The product manager at Typepad emailed me and was like: "I heard you are having issues, get at me dog." He didn’t say it like that but that’s how I thought of the email in my mind. Receiving an unsolicited email from a product manager about a complaint is unheard of. My brain could almost not comprehend it. Was this a company that actually cares what the lowly customer actually thinks? Can you imagine getting an email from a company’s product manager saying they heard you’d had a complaint and we’re curious if they could make it better? He even apologized about the unsolicited email. Good manners and everything… Wow.

So I emailed him back and suggested we chat over IM due to the nature of my complaint. He writes me back and we have a discussion on IM. All of a sudden there is a human on the other end of the line. This was not elevator music and some annoying woman’s voice saying they value your call. This was a person trying to make his product better by initiating contact with me.

I tell him my problem, he adds it to the list of things to do and says they’ll try to make it better. I tell him about other complaints and he tells me they’ve already fixed a bunch of them. I also tell him a thing or two he didn’t know and he plans on looking into them. I ask him about transparency and he suggests they’re trying to become more transparent with the stuff they’re working on.

You might think this isn’t feasible to do with bigger companies and you’re probably right. Then again Typepad isn’t exactly small either. How many times have you been asked for your input from the product manager of a company? Probably never…

I don’t want to tell you how the product manager found me because I don’t want his feed(s) to lose value by people trying to chime in. If you’re a tech nerd you’ll know how he found my post. The point is, they’re listening very well. THEY GET IT! They understand that blogs are not just about publishing, but rather they’re also about listening.

So.

Typepad doesn’t suck.

In fact it’s pretty sweet.

It’s great for lazy nerds like me who don’t want to write a whole bunch of code or design a site from scratch. I’d install Movable Type or WordPress on my own server but then why bother? Just use Typepad!

business customerservice Typepad

iPod mini on eBay

I’m selling some gear that I no longer use on eBay. If you’re looking for a video camera, a digital camera, a still camera, an iPod mini, or an external dvd burner go look here. I thought it was worth mentioning in the off chance somebody out there in "cyberspace" was interested.

syndicated me (us)

Doesn’t it seem like text posts seem so quaint these days? It’s been a while since I did a regular old fashioned blog post so here’s some stream of consciousness for those of you who care. I was just thinking about how this site has changed over time. My presence online has gone from “my personal internet web page” to a full blown syndicated multimedia stream. In the beginning my brother and I made some web pages that only exist now as digital archeology in the waybackmachine. My sites we’re so crappy but I learned quite a bit from it. I can still remember my brother showing me FTP before most people had even heard of this new thing called “electronic mail”. Websites we’re hard to make and pretty boring for me so I stopped making them. My brother started his career as a web designer and this launched him into other things. But he has also since started blogging again.

I eventually got back into making websites when my friend Bill showed me Blogger in September of 99. I made some sites which have also long since expired and completely disappeared. Then finally I decided I was going to have a blog for good. So I made thelastminute.blogspot.com with blogger because it was finally easy to maintain a site over time. At this point the blog has evolved (or de-evolved) from political link sharing, to anti bush whateverness, to personal journaling, to even more link sharing, to videoblog / video filtering. The current phase of (d)evolution of this site is syndicated me. The content has been ripped mixed and burned away from the format/design of the site and injected into one stream. With one feed you can passively/automagically obtain all the the text posts I’ve created, any video blogs I’ve made or linked to, any music I’ve linked to, and any photographs I’ve taken. All of that from one feed!

If you don’t understand any of that just think of this. My feed is like a picture frame. You go and put that frame on your wall (subscribe to my feed) and the content of that picture frame changes from my words, to my pictures, to my music, to my video, whenever I update it. You don’t have to do anything other than put the frame on your wall. You can also paint on this frame or write your own words in response to whatever it is that I’ve put there. Tell that to Guttenberg!

But you don’t care about any of that stuff… You want videos, podcasts, and interesting stuff to read while you pretend to be work. So put my feed into your aggregator, whether its Bloglines, Fireant, iTunes or whatever. Plug it in, lean back/forward and enjoy the juicy media that comes out the feed.

Totally unrelated: I woke up this morning at 4AM and went down to the local wifi watering hole. It’s a strange crowd up and about at this time of night. It’s like the core finance dudes getting up for the market on the east coast and homeless people being woken by the sun and the Jaguars. I like to think successful people get up early.

feedburner rss syndicate