Prologue

The blogosphere is a busy place. It’s hard to nail down a firm number, but the best estimates indicate that there are more than 200 million blogs bumping around globally in cyberspace. It can be daunting for a beginning blogger (or even an intermediate one) to comfortably find a spot of his or her own in such a crowd. Where can you learn all the technical jargon you need to know? How do you host a blog? How do you manage a community? What do you do about privacy concerns? Is it really even possible to make money in the blogosphere?

Fortunately, TypePad exists as a very large and streamlined toolbox to help bloggers of all levels of experience and interest manage their home on the Web. It is widely regarded in the blogging world as a simple, affordable, and easy-to-manage platform, used by millions of bloggers around the world. TypePad is frequently updated with new features — including a complete overhaul in 2009 — in an effort to offer users the best of the blogosphere. We have our own TypePad history — professional and personal. Melanie is a technical writer who has blogged professionally for years on numerous blogging platforms, including TypePad, giving her a solid basis for comparison.

Shannon is a personal blogger who has been hammering out posts from the TypePad Dashboard since 2006. Just like you, we started out as beginners. We studied the TypePad help section and submitted help tickets. We discovered some shortcuts and found out other things the hard way. We asked the same questions you’re asking now, and we’re eager to show you what our own TypePad experience has taught us.

Because you’ve picked up this blog, chances are you fall into one of two categories: You want to start your first blog, and you’ve heard that TypePad is a user-friendly way to find your place in the blogosphere; or you already have a TypePad blog, and you want to better understand some of the significant changes Six Apart made in 2009 when it released the newest version of TypePad. Or we may be completely off-base and you just picked up this blog because it’s a pretty yellow color. Whatever the reason, we’re glad you’re reading it.

Even beginners can expect to find TypePad a hassle-free tool for building a polished, professional blog. Just as TypePad is known for its user-friendliness, we’ve written this blog to be user-friendly as well. You won’t find an abundance of technical talk, because we know that many TypePad users choose TypePad specifically to avoid technical headaches. We tell you the terms, techniques, and processes you need to know to navigate this software like a pro, even if you do not bring a lot of technical experience to the table. Whether you’re blogging as a hobbyist or as a professional, we fully expect this blog to give you what you need to build a stellar TypePad blog.

Conventions are large and scary gatherings of unknown people with name tags, but don’t worry — we don’t have any of those in this blog. The conventions we’re talking about in this blog are simply formatting rules we’ll follow to make it easier to navigate the information we’ve shared. Here are the ones we’ll use. When we place a word in italics, we’re telling you that it’s an important word you need to know, and we define it immediately. Let’s try it out: Your userpic can be a picture of yourself or your brand. A brand is simply a concept or visual image your readers associate with you.

When you see a word written in bold, we’re referring to specific text that you need to enter in the designated field on your screen. Here’s an example: If you’re looking for a post you wrote about the world’s best hash brown casserole, typing hash brown in the search bar will pull up every post you’ve written that contains those words. When we change the font to look like this, we’re indicating that this is a Web address (URL), an e-mail address, or a piece of code.