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TypePad launches

The folks at TypePad have just announced the launch date for the service: Monday 4th August at 11:59 pm (Pacific Time).

They have also announced the full list of features, and pricing plans. You can get their “Basic” service for $4.95 a month, or $49.50 if you pay a year in advance. The “Plus” service, which is the first price plan that allows you to do Photo albums weighs in at $8.95 a month ($89.50 / year), and the “Pro” service, which gives you full control over all of your page templates, is $14.95 a month ($149.50 / year). All plans give a 30-day free trial, but note the absence of a “free” or “ad-supported” option. Smart.

These prices seem very good to me, especially when you see that they include 50, 100 and 200MB of disk space, and 1, 2 and 3GB of monthly bandwidth respectively. If you were just looking at web hosting providers, those prices would be competitive. When you consider that you’re getting the TypePad managed blogging service included, it’s a bit of a bargain.

I’m now wondering if my previous $145 estimate for the cost of Movable Type Pro might not be a bit on the low side. At $145, it would cost about the same as a year’s subscription to TypePad Pro. Considering that a subscription includes the cost of web space, TypePad sounds like a great deal for light and medium MT users. For these users the “Domain Mapping” feature (Plus and Pro only) will be a particularly important selling point, as it means not having to change your blog’s URL if you migrate to TypePad.

Heavy-duty blogging users may want more customizability than TypePad offers, or the ability to run custom scripts, or they may just prefer to keep tighter control of their own web space, and so they are more likely to want a slice of MT Pro.

I’d probably say that if Six Apart pitch MT Pro at anything less than $145, they will be cannibalizing sales of TypePad subscriptions. Subscriptions provide a reliable income stream, which leads to a more stable business model in a rapidly evolving market (like blogging). On the other hand, the potential user base for TypePad (people who want to blog, but don’t want the hassle) is much larger than the number of enthusiasts who have the time and knowledge to tweak an MT installation on their own servers. So even if MT Pro sales do eat into TypePad subscriptions, it won’t be by a significant percentage.

Also, given that the market for MT Pro consists mostly of individual bloggers rather than business users, there’s the question of how much higher the price can be before it becomes unattractive even to these enthusiasts. $145 is already quite a lot to pay for a piece of software. But enthusiasts can often be relied upon to lay down a lot of cash for good software. Take Photoshop, for example. A brand-new license will set you back $550, and an upgrade is $135. Yet non-corporate users continue to buy it.

My current guess is that they’ll put some kind of multi-tier pricing structure in place. Something like:

  • MT Basic (version 2.x): Free.
  • MT Basic (commercial use): $150
  • MT Pro (upgrade, only for users who have already donated to MT, and may be reduced by the amount of prior donations): $150
  • MT Pro (new license): $200 – $250
  • MT Pro (commercial use): $500+

However, Six Apart have a staff of three right now. With the launch of TypePad, they’re all going to be phenomenally busy. I don’t quite see how they’ll to be able to stage a release of MT Pro anytime soon….

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Matchbox 20 tickets

My brother Scott has got himself, Angela, and me tickets to see Matchbox 20 in Glasgow in September. Scott’s been a big Matchbox 20 fan for years. When he and Ange were in the US last month, they went to see them in Phoenix. They both thought they were great, and they’re looking forward to seeing them again in just a few weeks’ time. So am I!

Scott has lent me their three CDs, Yourself of Someone Like You, Mad Season, and More Than You Think You Are. There’s some fantastic stuff on there, especially on More than You Think You Are, their latest one. “Unwell”, a hauntingly beautiful song, has become the anthem for my working day:

All day staring at the ceiling

Making friends with shadows on my wall

All night hearing voices telling me

That I should get some sleep

Because tomorrow might be good for something

Hold on

Feeling like I’m headed for a breakdown

And I don’t know why

But I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell

I know right now you can’t tell

But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see

A different side of me

I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired

I know right now you don’t care

But soon enough you’re gonna think of me

And how I used to be…me

And I only work 4 days a week part-time. Sometimes I don’t know how my full-time colleagues cope.

Anyway–I’m looking forward to the gig!

Amazon Links

Yourself or someone like you Yourself or someone like you Yourself or someone like you

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Five Days of TypePad

I don’t think a web site has actually made me physically moan with anticipation and pleasure before now. But for goodness’ sake just take a look at TypePad.

For those of you who don’t know about it, TypePad is the “managed” blogging service from the people who developed Movable Type, the software that makes this weblog–and thousands of others across the web–work. When TypePad goes live, you’ll be able to sign up for an account, pick a couple of basic settings, and be up and running with your own blog within a couple of minutes. No need for your own server, no complicated setup, and no worries about having to maintain your own backups and stuff.

Details have been scarce for those of us who haven’t made it into their closed beta programme, but they’re currently in the middle of “Five Days of TypePad,” a teaser campaign for some of their drop-dead, eye-popping, killer app features:

Droooool. Much though I love tinkering with Movable Type on my own domain, unless Movable Type Pro is going to have all of these feaures, too, I’m going to be seriously tempted to move to TypePad myself.

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Disaster recovery

Sunpig.com was off the air for about nine hours from 2am (GMT) last night. Our site is histed with EZPublishing, whose are either resellers for Colossus.net, or they have their servers co-located at the same facility. Whatever the case, Colossus.net had a fire at their server facility last night. According to their recorded phone message, a power transformer exploded and set the cooling oil on fire.

The fire has been put out now, they have a backup transformer/generator in place, and their servers are starting to come back on-line again. It doesn’t look like we’ve lost any data on the web server, but I’m not sure what has happened to our incoming mail in the time that the server was out. If you’ve sent us anything in the last 12 hours, you might want to re-send it in case it got lost…

Note to self: must finish off those backup scripts…. I’ve got a script that creates a backup of our server database every day, but I haven’t got round to making it do anything useful with the backup afterwards…like email it to me, or FTP it to a different location. Fat lot of good that was going to be if the machine had gone up in flames. Keeping your backups on the same machine as your original files–or even in the same building–is about as useful as the proverbial chocolate teapot.

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Mozilla Firebird

I’ve been using the Opera web browser since version 5.11. Until now, it has been simply the best web browser available for Windows. It is lightweight, fast, and highly functional. When I wrote a review of it back in 2001, these were the five reasons I preferred it over Internet Explorer:

  • Tabbed browsing
  • Mouse gestures (in particular, the right click/left click “rocker” combination that equates to pressing the browser’s “back” button)
  • Open all bookmarks in a folder
  • Toggle images on/off
  • Open a new page in the background

Since then, I’ve found two more favourite features:

  • Fast searching in the address bar. Instead of going to Google and typing a search in the text field there, in Opera I can just type the letter “g” in the address bar, followed by my search query, and when I press <enter>, and go straight to the results page of this query. Likewise, I can use “a” to use the AllTheWeb search engine, or “z” to search Amazon.com. These searches and their shortcut letters are also very easily customizable.
  • HTML validation. The right-click context menu in Opera includes an option to submit the page you’re viewing to the W3C HTML validator for checking. This is great for doing web development: validation checking is just a mouse-click away.

When the Mozilla project started releasing final versions (1.0 and above) of its browser (May/June 2002-ish?) I started playing about with it, but I found it slow and unresponsive. It had some great technology behind it, primarily XUL, but as an actual web browser it was in no position to threaten Internet Explorer’s dominant market position. Actually, it sucked.

A lot has changed since then. Realizing that the Mozilla application suite (which included the browser, and email app, a HTML editor, and various kitchen sinks) was a dog with too many masters and no legs, the project team issued a new roadmap for development. The browser would be split off into a stand-alone component: Firebird. The email program would also be isolated: Thunderbird. These products would still use all the cool underlying Mozilla technology, but no longer would they try to be all things to all people, all at once. Now they were cooking!

I had a look at Firebird when it was still called Phoenix (versions 0.4 and 0.5, I think). It was okay, but still a bit flaky. The current version is 0.6.1, and it has become my default browser.

That’s right, it’s better than Opera.

First of all, it had to be as good as Opera, and that involves the list of favourite features I noted above:

  • Tabbed browsing: check!
  • Open all bookmarks in a folder: check!
  • Open a new page in the background: check!

But wait… that’s not everything I wanted.

Well, it turns out that two of the other features are available as extensions:

And unlike many other programs that allow plugins, Firebird extensions are very simple to install (just go to Tools -> Options -> Extensions). There are lots of them already, and many are being added all the time.

That still leaves two things: toggling images on/off, and quick one-letter search shortcuts in the address bar. Well, now that we have broadband, the ability to load pages without images has become a lot less important. You can still set the whole application not to load images at all, and doing this in Firebird is still easier than in Internet Explorer, but there doesn’t seem to be the one-button option to switch them back on for a single page that you get in Opera.

And as for the one-letter search shortcuts in the address bar, this feature is actually there by default–and has been there since the early days of Mozilla–but it’s not very well advertised. Eric Meyer has whole article explaining how to use it, but here’s the short version:

  1. If you have a default installation of Firebird, you should have a bookmarks folder called “Quick searches” with a bookmark called “Google Quicksearch” inside it. If you don’t have this bookmark, go to Google, and create a new bookmark for it.
  2. Right-click on this bookmark, and select “Properties” from the context menu.
  3. On the “Info” tab of the properties page, set the location to “http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s”, and set the keyword to be “g”
  4. Click OK.

You can now type “g” followed by a search term in your address bar, and you will jump straight to the Google results page.

You can use this technique to create any number of your own custom one-letter address bar searches. They key to doing it is knowing how the search engine formulates its search query. For example, Google’s home page is http://www.google.com/. But to actually display a list of search results, Google needs to know what it’s searching for. If you type some search terms into Google’s search box (say, “cow tipping”) and press the “Google Search” button, you’ll notice that the URL displayed in the address bar changes to something like http://www.google.com/search?q=cow+tipping.

Depending on the search engine you use, the URL won’t look exactly like that, but it will most likely have your search query sitting in it somewhere. Sometimes the spaces between your search terms will have been replaced with “%20”, and sometimes they will have been replaced with a “+” sign. Don’t worry about that.

Copy and paste this whole URL, including your search phrase, into the “Location” field in the properties of your newly created bookmark. Then, select the search phrase, and replace it with “%s”. When you do your one-letter search, this “%s” in the location will be replaced with whatever text you’ve typed after the search letter.

If you can’t be bothered building these search queries for yourself, here are a few I prepared earlier. All you have to do is create a new bookmark for each of them, and then change their properties. Give them a one-letter keyword, and copy-and-paste the URL below:

Search Engine Search URL
Google Groups (Usenet) http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%s
AllTheWeb http://www.alltheweb.com/search?q=%s
Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?keyword=%s
Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/external-search?keyword=%s
IMDb http://us.imdb.com/Find?for=%s

So far I’ve covered why Firebird is as good as Opera (for me, at least). Why is it better? Two reasons:

  • Opera is still very lightweight and fast. But it has been gathering more and more features recently. It hasn’t been slowing down under their combined weight, though, which is a great testament for them. But Firebird feels smaller and more nimble.
  • It’s those darned extensions. Firebird seems to have a very flexible extensability architecture, and it’s all completely open. It has kept the core features to a minimum, while allowing developers to produce their own widgets. Ordinary users reap the benefits: you pick and choose the ones you want, and ignore the rest. That’s just so nice.

So it’s not a huge advantage that Firebird has over Opera…but it’s enough of an edge to make me switch.

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