Okay, that concludes my test drive, which has lasted less than half an hour. Easy, pleasant, and rather capable -- in some ways better than Movable Type. I think it's a good hosting setup for people looking to start a blog, or for people who have blogs who are looking for a steady, reliable home. A really high-traffic / high-storage blog probably belongs elsewhere, but otherwise I think it's a good deal for most everyone.
Okay, this isn't really a problem for most people, but it's a deal killer for me: Even TypePad Pro only comes with 5 GB per month of bandwidth. That's not bad for the price, really, but it's less than a day's worth for me. Most people, however, won't have issues with that unless they get a lot of referrals from elsewhere. I haven't heard people complain about TypePad's policies, which is probably because at the moment, they don't appear to have any yet: "We will be charging overusage fees for bandwidth and disk overusage. We haven't yet set the rate for those fees, and we will not actually be charging them until we have an option in place to purchase additional bandwidth or disk space at a lower cost."
Seems reasonable, though if you've got a high-traffic blog you may want to look at a standalone Movable Type installation instead, or talk to the TypePad folks about cutting a deal. . . .
UPDATE: Just checked the stats on InstaPundit's server and it's used 216 gigabytes so far this month, making it something over 10 gigabytes a day. So I guess I won't be switching to TypePad. . . .
I just used the upload feature to upload this photo of me, from the local paper's article on blogs. I'm wearing a suit because they sent the photographer by with about 15 minutes notice, right before I went to a law school dinner. I don't generally dress up for blogging. . . .
The photo-upload feature is much the same as Movable Type's. It's very easy. I don't use MT's photo-upload feature on my InstaPundit blog, though I've played with it a bit -- I upload using an FTP program. I'm not sure why. Habit, I guess.
TypePad supports post-via-email, but I haven't tried to figure it out yet. I've been doing this for about 10-15 minutes, which demonstrates how easy it is.
UPDATE: Went to look at the post-by-email instructions. Looks pretty easy.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader "Mac" comments: "How about a rule - for every pic of you, one of the Instawife!" Fair enough, I guess. This one was taken with the Toshiba using natural light, and just a bit of the Photoshop "fill flash" effect to lighten the shadows.
Hmm. You have to click the link to make this work. Every time I tried to upload the file using the TypePad utility, it took me to a new post, so I just cut and pasted the HTML it generated. But it's not showing a thumbnail here for some reason. Go figure. It's easy to use, but it's not foolproof, I guess.
Anybody got any suggestions on what I did wrong?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Followed the advice of a commenter, below, but it's a workaround. If you want to see the photo full-size, you'll still have to click on "view image."
I'm trying out TypePad, at the invitation of Anil Dash. The user interface is a bit prettier than Movable Type's, though it's not all that terribly different from MT, or from Blogger for that matter.
