Category: TypePad

Sep 22

How To Use MarsEdit with TypePad in 2022

Marsedit and typepad

How do you configure MarsEdit to work with the Typepad blogging platform?  As I’ve started to try to get back into blogging more, I found that MarsEdit, the tool I’ve been using to write blog posts for 10+ years now, was no longer connecting to Typepad. And in a sign of how far the mighty (Typepad) have fallen, a Typepad blog can’t be auto configured by MarsEdit, and isn’t even listed anymore on the MarsEdit manual configuration page. And… there is nothing whatsoever in the Typepad knowledge base about external editors, XML-RPC, “Movable Type”, or anything else.

So for anyone still remaining on Typepad who wants to do this, here is what you need to do.

1. Get the blog ID from Typepad.

I couldn’t find this in any of the settings, but you can get it from the URL. Once you are logged into Typepad, and are in the settings for one of your blogs, the URL in your browser will be something like:

https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a01d1212acd6e53ef00d12345de09f92/dashboard

The hex string that I show in bold is the part you need. (And that is not the actual value for one of my blogs.)

2. Add a new blog in MarsEdit

In the main MarsEdit window, press the “+” in the lower left corner of the app to add a new blog. Type in the name and URL of your Typepad blog and press “Continue”. The auto-configuration will fail, and you will be prompted to manually configure the site. Under Connection Settings, you need to use:

  • System Name: Other
  • System API: Movable Type API
  • API Endpoint URL: https://www.typepad.com/services/xmlrpc
  • Blog ID: <the hex string that you copied in step 1 above>

Here’s a screenshot of the preferences screen:

Marsedit connection preferences

 

3. Login With Your Typepad User Info

After you save those settings, MarsEdit will prompt you to “login” to your blog. This is where you enter your Typepad username and password.

Marsedit login

4. Start Writing with MarsEdit

Once this is done, you should see the MarsEdit interface load the most recent posts into the editor window. (If not, you may need to hit the refresh circle.)

That’s it. You should now be able to create posts in MarsEdit and publish them on a Typepad blog.

And really… 5. Figure Out How To Move Away From Typepad!

The complete lack of any information in the Typepad knowledge base about working with external editors does concern me. Add to that the fact that the “Everything Typepad” site hasn’t been updated with a new post since October 2021. And that the @typepad Twitter account only gets occasionally updated about trouble issues.

And.. that the Wikipedia article about TypePad notes that Typepad stopped accepting new signups as of 2020.

So they are really just existing for the people like me who just haven’t gotten around to moving our blogs to some other platform. 🙁

Perhaps this IS the year when I finally figure out how to migrate my 5 remaining Typepad blogs over to Wordpress… sigh… 

Feb 24

TypePad To Start Using Akismet To Fight Blog Comment Spam

Yes! The folks at TypePad announced today they going to start using Akismet to fight blog comment spam! As a user of TypePad since 2005-ish, I've long been frustrated with how poorly TypePad's anti-comment-spam mechanisms have worked and have written about that, although granted that particular incident was now 3.5 yrs ago and things have improved a bit in that I'm not seeing quite as much spam. However, I've also turned on full moderation on the couple of remaining blogs I still have on TypePad.

All my new blogs and other sites are over on WordPress where I've been very happy with the anti-spam services that I get from Akismet. (And some day I'd like to move this blog and Disruptive Telephony over to WordPress, too - if only I can carve out the considerable time that will be involved with the move.)

I'm pleased to see TypePad moving this way. It may not be enough to get me to stop using full moderation on my articles... but hopefully it should mean fewer spam comments to look at in the admin interface.

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Nov 24

The Problem Of Trying Blogging From An iPad Using TypePad

Yesterday's blog post epitomizes one of the problems I have with creating blog posts on a tablet that work with TypePad, the service with which I started hosting this site way back in 2005.

All I wanted to do is have an image that was right-justified with the text wrapping around it. Instead I got this:

Rightjustified not

(Which has now been changed to be correctly right-justified, but through the regular desktop web interface, not to the mobile interface.)

In order to write more regularly, I've been trying out using the iPad as a writing platform. It's been working well for sites hosted on WordPress, but not so well for TypePad.

Because the TypePad app is fairly useless on the iPad, I wrote the post using Blogsy, a fairly interesting and useful blogging app for the iPad. However, try as I might, I could not get Blogsy to right-justify and wrap the image. The issue seems to be that Blogsy would only send to TypePad the <img> tag with this attribute:

class="alignright"

Now this might be fine if the CSS for my theme on TypePad defined a class like that, but it doesn't. I tried multiple times to edit the raw HTML in Blogsy to add the simple inline CSS to the IMG tag of:

style="float:right;"

However, Blogsy kept removing that style attribute when sending it to TypePad. Now, maybe there is some setting in Blogsy that I couldn't find that would pass along CSS attributes... but if so, I have no idea what it is.

Trying other apps to correct the problem... as I mentioned, the TypePad app is fairly useless on the iPad. It is only an iPhone application and so while you can blow it up to take over the whole iPad screen, it is still an iPhone app and doesn't make use of the iPad's screen nor of its improved keyboard. More importantly, it only lets you create new posts - there is no way to edit or modify existing posts... so there was no way to get in and modify the post to add this style attribute to the image.

Next, I tried the "mobile" website for TypePad, but it doesn't seem to work so well on the iPad. I tried to get in and modify the post above and wasn't able to easily do so.

Finally I tried logging directly into the "regular" TypePad website on the iPad. It looked like it might work as I could get into the HTML view (which was the only view, actually) and add the style attribute. But when I went to try to publish the updated post, the Publish button didn't work.

In the end, I had to go to my desktop system and login to the regular TypePad web interface to make this change.

This is a perfect example of what I referred to in my "Barriers to Blogging" series as "Getting The Tools Out Of The Way". A whole chunk time spent... simply to get an image to be right-justified. :-(

Now to get the tools out of the way in this case, I may again search for a better blog post editor on the iPad. Another option, of course, would be to move this blog off of TypePad and over to one of my WordPress servers (where the tools work better)... but that's a much longer process. Still, it is another answer.

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