«
»

Short Rant on the New Typepad Editor

November 1, 2008, 8:43 am

I am getting used to the new Typepad editor, but two issues still really cause me to question the sanity of the developers, particularly since this roll out has been going on since June:

  • I cannot believe that a blogging engine -- not a generic text editor or HTML editor, but a purpose built blogging engine -- would eliminate the blockquote functionality from the editor.  Have these guys ever, you know, actually read a blog or two?  We bloggers live off block quotes.
  • How long has the computing spelling checking been around?  A couple of decades?  About 10 minutes into that 20 year span, developers learned from users that in addition to a "skip" button, they probably needed a "skip all" button.  Because if you write a 5000 word post on the banking crisis and use the "Bernanke" in that post 100 times, it is going to be real boring hitting "skip" 100 times in the spell check rather than "skip all" or even better "add to dictionary."  But, the rocket scientists at Typepad did indeed only put in a "skip" option, a bit like Ford building a car in which the windows won't roll down.
Tags: , ,
Category: Blogging, Computers & the Internet
  • T J Sawyer

    Best yet, it is clear evidence that someone is writing a text editor from scratch. It has only been a bit over twenty years since Information Engineering, Object-Oriented Development and a bundle of other alleged innovations have promised us "reusable code". You will soon be able to pluck useful modules from libraries of code and embed them...

  • SunSword

    Welcome to the consequences of "outsourcing". Yes. The poor suckers that did this probably really DIDN'T have a grasp of 20 years of blogging. Because they just got jammed through some Indian techno-school, and as "freshers" are the cheapest meat on the market. So they got hired to do the work. They probably hard-coded items that should be variables, hard coded data structures rather than doing dynamic memory allocation so we will get to experience unexplained "crashes", and yes they didn't think through any consequences at all. But heck -- none of the folks that produced this build still work there -- programmers change jobs after every "job" or even heck every WEEK in India.

    But hey. They are only $20/day.

  • http://drweb.typepad.com/ DrWeb

    Agreed.. it's a lousy editor, and for me, it's broken most of my use of Quickpost - my primary method of posting. The editing to fix it so it matches my blog style - even with my CSS trying hard, is a nightmare. I add in blockquote, and it tries to fix how that works. I have to remove

    and

    from the editor "trying" to help.
    I don't know what to do, maybe change to another blog platform.

    Best,
    DrWeb

  • http://www.tinyvital.com/blog John Moore

    I used to use typepad. Converted to WordPress. In both cases, on my own web site (not a blogging service).

    I'm happy with WP. It gets the job done.

  • http://www.synthstuff.com/mt/ Dave Halliday

    I use Movable Type so not really familiar with Typepad.

    That being said, you might want to check out ieSpell

    http://www.iespell.com/

    You right click on any web form window and the option to spell check is there on the popup menu.

    Very fast, nice and free for personal use.

  • Bob Smith

    Google's (blogspot's) editor doesn't have blockquote either. I think they used to have it, because I remember using it.

  • http://hectorowen.blogspot.com Hector Owen

    Bob Smith, re blogger blockquote: It's the quote marks in the icon bar at the top of the edit window, between bulleted list and spellcheck. I use it all the time. Hope this helps.

  • http://www.car-insurance-choices.com Susan

    I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

    Susan

    http://www.car-insurance-choices.com