free blog |
CREATING A TYPEPAD BLOG |
TypePad’s two domains are typepad.com; your domain would be yourdomain.typepad.com blogs.com; your domain would be yourdomain.blogs.com Use the drop-down menu to choose typepad.com or blogs.com, and then choose a subdomain name. This choice is irrevocable, so don’t be capricious. The only way to change your subdomain is to cancel the account (discarding any blogging you had done) and start over. The subdomain that you choose when signing up serves as an anchor name for all your blogs if you have two or more (see the service levels in the next section). Imagine that John and Alice Smith want to blog together and also blog individually.
They start three TypePad blogs, called Our Family Blog, John Smith, and Alice Smith. The account holding these three blogs is assigned just one subdomain, selected by Alice. Each blog is located in a folder attached to the main domain that includes their subdomain. Here is what the three Web addresses look like:
subdomain.typepad.com/ourfamilyblog
subdomain.typepad.com/johnsmith
subdomain.typepad.com/alicesmith
As you can see, the subdomain is not yet chosen. When signing up for an account, Alice should keep in mind that the subdomain is part of the Web address for each of the three blogs, so it shouldn’t be too individual or unique to her. If, for example, she were to choose alicemom as the sub-domain, the Web address of John’s blog would be:
alicemom.typepad.com/johnsmith A better subdomain would be smithfamily, or some other choice that would apply well to each blog.
Although you cannot change your subdomain after signing up, you can change the names of the folders assigned to each new blog. When you start a second blog, the default folder-naming process makes the choice for you. What might escape your attention is that you can change the default folder name (identical to your subdomain name). Going back to Alice and John, let’s imagine that Alice chose smithfamily as the subdomain during sign-up. Alice and John intend to call their joint blog Our Family Blog, but the default Web address of that blog would now be.
There’s nothing terribly wrong with that, and the Smiths might even prefer to leave it for simplicity’s sake. But if they want the folder name to match the blog name (Our Family Blog, which is displayed on the site’s banner), that folder name should be changed to ourfamilyblog. If you want to change the default folder name of the first blog (that’s the default blog TypePad sets up immediately after sign-up), you should do so before you start blogging. If you change any folder name after posting entries to that blog, you mess up any existing links to archives and photo albums. You don’t actually lose anything you’ve written, but the functionality of everything posted before the change is compromised. See the “Setting Up Your Blog” section, later in this chapter.
Choosing a service level TypePad offers three service levels: Basic, Plus, and Pro. They are essentially the same product, with varying amounts of storage space on the server and certain features withheld from the Basic and Plus levels. You must choose a subscription level when signing up, but that doesn’t prevent you from canceling during the free trial or changing your subscription level at any time. Price is perhaps the most obvious differentiator among the plans, along with storage space, the number of permitted blogs, and the number of per-
mitted authors. Currently, the plans break down.