i know everyone else is covering this, but since it interests me as well i wanted to put a blurb up about it. six apart yesterday announced typepad. from the various articles i’ve read it sounds like it’s shaping up to be an amazing solution.


the basic idea behind textpad sounds like six aparts attempt to produce a blogger killer. the solution will be hosted, though it hasn’t yet been mentioned if they will host your domain as well or just the cms itself. i left blogger because it didn’t give me the flexibility i wanted with my blog and the system was always having problems that prevented me from posting. i’m sure that six apart is going to have similar growing pains, lets just hope they get through it unscathed. the feature set of textpad looks amazing; built-in photo album creation tool, built-in blogroll, lists of books and music you are reading and listening to, better templates, more plugins, real-time statistics, posting by email, and automatic creation of foaf data just to name a few.


i don’t think that i’d purchase this product as a hosted solution but based on the feature set it’s definitely something i would pay for. i would just rather host with the hosting provider of my choosing with me as the technical support, not someone else. there was a mention of a movable type pro version. i’m not sure if this is going to be some incarnation of textpad but it’s definitely something i’ll be looking for. you can sign up over at the typepad site to get on the email notification and beta list if your interested.