Last month, I set up a trial on Typepad. I've had this blog here for almost two and a half years, and I thought about moving to the next level. I did enjoy the Typepad service, and I would love to stay with them. I have a few reasons why I won't right now, although I would love to go back someday when I'm ready and have the time to take blogging seriously.
I don't have the time
I recently read that the difference between an amateur writer and a professional writer is that the professional writes even when he does not feel like it. That places me solidly in the amateur category. I often don't feel like writing, or I don't have the time to write, but in any case I'm not able to keep up a solid writing pace to make the $89.50 a year price of Typepad worth it for me.
The options aren't as powerful as I hoped
Typepad has a lot more power than Blogger. I love the fact that I can check my logs to see where people are coming to my blog from. To the best of my knowledge, you can't yet do that with Blogger. Of course, in just under a month, I wasn't really able to drum up any traffic to my blog.
I had also hoped to be able to edit my template more. The problem I ran into here is that only through the Typepad Professional are you able to edit the actual html of your template. I like the three column layout and I want to find a way to hack my Blogger template to add more columns. I don't want to put so much content on my blog that your head spins, but it would still be nice to put up useful widgets.
I may consider getting my own website in the near future and running a Wordpress blog on it, but until them I'll stay with Blogger.
One thing I would like to add that I like about Typepad and makes me respect them even more: cancellation is easy. All you have to do is click one link in your Control Panel and your account is canceled. I highly respect that, and I will definitely use Typepad again at a point when I can take a paid blogging account seriously. Many sites and services don't make cancellation as easy, and seem to want to lock users into a paid service from which there is no easy way out. My wife decided to do a free trial of The Biggest Loser Club (I won't link because they don't deserve the boost to their search engine ranking). Her trial ran out on a Saturday, but when she clicked the "Cancel account" link, she was taken to a page informing her that she had to call a number. Of course, this number is only staffed during business hours, and because her trial ran out on a Saturday, The Biggest Loser Club by default gets at least one paid month from my wife because nobody was answering the number on a Saturday. As the boys on South Park say: "You bastards!"
You don't have to worry about lock-in with Typepad. They're ethical, and I respect that. I will surely be back.
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