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Better blogging coming to Six Apart

Better blogging coming to Six Apart

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman
2 min read
"Do you have a blog?" Anil Dash, VP at blogging company Six Apart, kept asking as people came up to his booth at the Maker Faire. Some people did, some didn't. At least everybody seemed to know what blogs are.

I have a TypePad blog (TypePad is Six Apart's paid blog hosting service), so I took the opportunity to say so and to complain about the service's first-generation blog-writing interface. You just enter text into a small box. There are a few buttons for formatting, but overall it's not very Web 2.0, and there's no excuse for such a primitive interface when great online word processors such as Writely, Zoho Writer, and ThinkFree are proliferating.

I was told that Six Apart will soon be rolling out a more contemporary blog entry tool, which I am happy about and anxious to try. I hope it's as good as Writely. Also, I asked if the company was going to offer people the opportunity to print their blogs, like you can do with the beta product Blurb. I'm told that this, too, is in the works.

These are positive developments. Previously I have complained about the lack of an advertising engine for TypePad. That was fixed. I also went off on a rant about how hard it was to hack other tools and code into a blog, and TypePad added "widgets." I'm not saying my cocktail-party complaints made the difference, just that I appreciate that the company listens to its users and appears to be adding the tools and features we want.