And an awesome excuse for annoying alliteration, as well! Heh. But I promise I'll stop that now, since what I really want to post is a review of the pros and cons of Amazon's aStore program. Note: Adding an Amazon aStore to your blog requires no template hacks. It's as easy as cutting and pasting a bit of code into a blog entry!

About a month ago I got an email from Amazon inviting me to try out their new aStore program, but didn't get a chance to do more than glance at it until today. It's actually pretty cool… using your Amazon Associates account, you can build an inline store to display and sell items from Amazon within your blog. You don't need to know how to code, it's easy to set up, and to a certain degree you control the content in the store. When readers buy items, Amazon pays you through your existing Associates account. If you haven't got an Amazon Associates account, it's easy to set one up and earn up to 8.5% in referral fees.

If you'd like to see an example of how a store looks and works within a TypePad blog, take a look at the store I built. It took me about 15 minutes, but that was because I was being picky and trying out every option. If all you want is an easy potential revenue stream for your blog, you can probably set up a store in less time than it takes to read this review.

There are some things I really like about the aStore program, and some that I don't. I'll start with the good stuff.

Here's where aStore gets it right:

• It's easy.
• It's hosted on Amazon's secure servers, but you can use it on your own site.
• The interface, documentation and steps to create a store are clear.
• There are options— you can create a link to your stand-alone store on Amazon, embed the store in your own site with iframes or use HTML frames to incorporate it into your site.
• When readers click a product in your store, it loads all of Amazon's info within the same page… I much prefer this to a store that would take readers off-site.
• Amazon provides widgets that allow you to include (or exclude) features such as your Amazon.com Wishlist , Listmania (reader lists on Amazon), Similar Items, Accessories, Customer Reviews, and Editorial Reviews. All but the reviews show up in sidebars on you store page… the reviews are included in the body copy of individual items (or not, your choice).

What aStore could do to improve:

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In a recent comment, Sylvia Forester asked

What can we do to stop Bitacle from stealing our posts and making money off of them?

Rather than responding in the comments, it seemed like a good topic for a full blog post. Copyright and IP law are much too large a topic to cover extensively here, but I can provide a few thoughts on where to start.

I haven't looked at Bitacle previously, but with a quick scan of a couple pages it appears to me that they do include a link back to the original content when they repost material. This may in fact be a benefit to your blog, as people who use Bitacle for search may find you for the first time and become regular readers… There are a number of sites that I allow to republish content from the TypePad Hacks blog in order to reach a wider audience. They send a fair bit of traffic and I don't begrudge them a few advertising dollars in exchange. On the other hand, it is possible that your reputation could be harmed by spam blogs harvesting your posts and republishing them on sites that contain offensive or dangerous material.

An important question to ask yourself before taking action is why you object to your content being reused: is it because someone else may be making money from your content or because you don't want your personal brand to be diluted by appearing in multiple places online? This will help you frame the tone of your response. You should also ask yourself whether your reputation or brand is helped or harmed by broader distribution… If the republishing site contains proper attribution and/or a link back to your site, they may be doing you more good than harm even if they make a buck or two in the process. Remember, Google makes advertising dollars when they list you in their search engine and you wouldn't want them to stop listing you!

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Most of the reviews of Vox so far have focused on the social networking and privacy features… Which makes sense, because that's the Big Story Six Apart is telling about Vox.

Vox has the ability to set specific privacy features on a post by post basis. A blog post on Vox can be set for the world, friends and family, friends, family, or for you only. For a lot of bloggers, this is actually kind of a big deal… with all the stories in the news about bloggers being fired from jobs because of posts online, or failing to get a job after a google search revealed a compromising MySpace page, I can see where it would be a relief to be able to record your thoughts and share them with a select group.

For me, it's not such a big deal… my income stream comes from being pretty much exactly who I am. In most cases I feel that if I'm likely to offend someone by being the guy I am, then I probably shouldn't work for them. I'm big on the idea that a candid public persona is a huge time-saver for everyone. When I do want privacy, I just use email or the phone (and yeah, I know, email isn't as private as you'd think, but I figure anyone who can tap mine is entitled to laugh at my more off-color remarks). The feature that I do dream of when it comes to privacy, is a way to go back and edit or delete comments I make on other blogs when I've been awake too long and say something I later regret… it doesn't happen often, but it has happened.

There's a new Feature for TypePad today: FeedBurner integration. Click the image below to enlarge, or just go to Weblogs > Configure > Feeds to check it out live. The best part? If you already use FeedBurner, you can connect any users who may have subscribed to your native TypePad feed to the feed from feedburner, which means you'll now have a much more accurate picture of how many readers are subscribed to your blog. Nice!

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Just stumbled onto an announcment on the Technorati blog announcing two new services. Tantek Çelik writes:

I'm very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem. Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web.

Microformats enable any site to easily publish common data types such as tags, licenses, contacts, events, reviews, listings, etc. on any page on the Web, with only minor edits to their HTML. For me personally, this has meant enabling millions of people to take control of their own data, publish and update it wherever they want, whenever they want, and move it freely among services, without having it locked up behind a walled garden or trapped in a "roach motel".

Read more about Microformats Search and Pingerati on the Technorati blog. Read a simple overview of what microformats are here and here.

This is all completely new to me but if I'm getting the basics correctly (and for tonight, I just skimmed) it looks like one of those things that initially seems complicated and quickly simplifies everything else once you grasp it. Like RSS, CSS, Tags, etc. I think it's something I'll really like when I dig in a bit. A quote from the Microformats.org wiki sums it up pretty well:

Microformats make it easy for you or anyone to share and reuse data in your webpages and content elsewhere -- for example, to populate an address book, browse social relationships, share reviews, tag content or publish and discover events.

Now, if this means I could publish my email address and keep it away from spambots, I'm in. But since it says elsewhere that the formats are both human and machine readable, I'm guessing it will not solve that problem (darn it). But it might be the answer to a question I got last week from Marcy at Root Magazine. She saw a beta version of ExtCalendar and wanted to be able to embed a searchable events calendar in her TypePad blog. Microformats kinda look like a way to do that.

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Sometimes it can be really difficult to track down bugs that cause your blog to display improperly? especially when the issue is not something you did in your template, but a mistake or typo in an actual post or TypeList.

The other day a question came in via comment on the FAQ page. Richard Murray was experiencing an issue that caused the text size in his blog to display larger in Internet Explorer than in other browsers. Oddly, when I viewed the blog in IE, I wasn't able to replicate the issue. Bud suggested that it might be related to using keyword font sizing rather than specifying font sizes in pixels (MT uses keywords such as xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, and xx-large to describe font sizes and IE doesn't respond well to these). But although that was a good guess, it wasn't the answer either.

In the end, it turned out to be a pretty simple problem: an open tag in Rich's code was causing all the text after the tag to display larger. I had a similar problem once when I failed to close a bold tag in a TypeList. The entire blog displayed in bold text until I figured it out, making it very difficult to read. This kind of error can be difficult to trouble-shoot. After all, one wouldn't expect a typo in a TypeList to effect the display of an entire blog. I spent a lot of time digging around in my templates before figuring out where the problem was.

That's why it's a good idea not only to view your blog in all the major browsers, but to periodically run your site through an HTML validator. Here's a list of resources you can use to make sure that your blog will display properly on all platforms and in all browsers.

Checking your template and page code:

The first two links here are services that you definitely should run your blog through every now and then to make sure it's functioning properly for all your readers. I especially recommend using these after implementing any new hacks on your blog's template code.

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Kathy Sierra's blog, Creating Passionate Users
is one of my favorite reads and was a big part of what inspired me to
start the TypePad Hacks project. Which is ironic, in a way, because
although I agree with Kathy on a lot of things, our take on feature
requests is totally opposed. Her recent post Don't give in to feature demands! starts out:

The more successful the product or service is, the stronger the
pressure to give in to user requests. The more users you have, the more
diverse the requests. One user's must-have-or-else feature is another
user's deal-killer. And the more popular your product or service is,
the more those requests start turning into demands and ultimatums, and
finally very harsh criticisms.

The worst thing we can do is give in. But as the requests/demands
and criticisms become louder and angrier, the harder it is to resist
the siren call— "But if we just added this one thing… these guys would
ease up."

But when we've blended all the colors into one muddy blob, then
nobody hates us, and nobody is delighted, excited, or turned on by what
we do. We become mediocre. Usually the worst place to be.

She goes on to list 13 categories of "people who might
make feature requests or demands," and suggest how and when companies
should respond to them. It's an interesting read. I recommend it for
regular readers here who have participated in the discussion of adding
features to TypePad.

Now, I get where Kathy is coming from when she says that trying
to do too many things can lead to mediocrity (or worse, even). At the
same time, I wouldn't necessarily agree that the bulk of features fall
into a must-have/deal-killer dynamic. There's hardly an app on my
laptop where I use all the features, but generally it doesn't bother me that they do more

than I need them to. So long as the application remains stable,
reasonably fast, and the options are well-organized, I'm perfectly
willing to ignore what I don't need. The place where I see a risk of
alienating one user to please another is not so much in adding features
as in changing them. Everyone gets frustrated when a new version
launches and they can't find or use the features that had become second
nature. But new stuff? I don't see an issue…

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Not long ago I posted about a hack that allowed TypePad users to ban specific words in comments or trackbacks by entering them in the field for banning IP addresses. I cautioned against using it at the time because it had an unresolved issue— the words were not specific enough. Banning the word "the" would also ban "theater," "theremin," and so on. But that just changed.

TypePad has updated their spam protection settings to make this a real feature with an improved interface allowing words to be banned safely. Now, I'm not one to ban profanity for example… and there are a lot of words that show up in spam that also have legitimate uses (like MP3 for example). But there's a much more powerful, hidden side to this new word banning feature. It allows you to ban URLs!

If I can ban specific URLS, I can prevent the vast bulk of spam from ever reaching my blog. This has me pretty excited. Banning IP addresses doesn't do much to stop the spread of spam… IP addresses can be generated on the fly. I've often had dozens of spam comments or trackbacks from the same website that use different names, IPs and contents. The one thing they all share in common is the URL. So, while I wouldn't suggest banning the word "online," banning "www.spaces.msn.com/onlinecasinosgambling" is a winner.

I've actually been saving a few spam trackbacks all week while I waited for this to go live, just so I could have the pleasure of banning them officially. Heh. It's too soon to say for sure, but I really think this will be a much more effective way to block spam than CAPTCHAs or IP banning. In fact, I'm going to remove the CAPTCHA requirement from my comments now that this has launched. I hate having to fill them in myself in order to reply to comments.

Here's a screen grab (click to enlarge) of the new Word and IP Banning feature, accessible at Control Panel > Site Access > Word and IP Banning. The description;

How would it feel if after all the time you've put in on your blog, it suddenly disappeared from google altogether? And loaded at a crawl if someone actually did know where to find you and wanted to read your posts?

How would you like to pay more money for slower internet?

If that sounds good to you, say, $60 a month for dial-up speed access then DON'T click the link below and sign the petition. If you liked TV better when there were only 2 or 3 channels, DON'T click the link. DON'T sign the petition. If you wish that the only businesses you could shop at were big box stores, DO NOTHING. Because it's easier to ignore stuff and wait for it to go away. A smaller internet will certainly be easier to keep track of. We won't need to worry about googlejuice, technorati rankings or SEO if Congress passes this bill.

On the other hand, if you ever buy from small businesses, like to find
new music or video online, sometimes read stories or news from sources
other than the networks, or have ever wanted something unusual that you
just couldn't find nearby, the Please Do sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Network Neutrality.

To be honest, I don't believe in petitions and have lost most faith in
our political process, but if this bill is signed into law I could very
well go out of business. And so will a lot of the other people and
websites that you may currently enjoy. I don't know if we can make a
difference, but I would feel foolish for not at least trying.

Several telecom and media companies have decided that they would like
you to pay more for the internet than you already do. More importantly,
they would like to achieve this in part by auctioning off what you can
see online to the highest bidder. For instance, if you go online to buy
a fire pit right now, you'll find a link to my Great Bowl O Fire pretty
near the top of google. But if AT&T or Time Warner are able to get
this bill through congress they'll be able to sell control of search
results to companies like Target or Walmart. I'll still be online, but
good luck finding me.

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Well, heck. Here I spent the week working on anti-spam hacks only to find that today TypePad added the ability to require CAPTCHAs for unauthenticated commenters. From Everything TypePad:

You can now require unauthenticated commenters (who don't sign in through TypeKey) to pass a CAPTCHA test
before their comment is posted to your blog. The CAPTCHA (a
""completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans
apart") will help prevent automated robots from posting comment spam to
your blog.

You might want to read the original post to see the five new bug fixes that were announced today also.

To enable CAPTCHAs:

1. Go to the Configure tab for the blog you want to change
2. Click on preferences in the sub-menu
3. Scroll down to Comment and TrackBack Preferences
4. Check the box that says "Require unauthenticated commenters to validate with a CAPTCHA."
5. Don't forget to save changes at the bottom of the page and republish your blog.

This is a good step forward, though I don't feel that CAPTCHAs are the best strategy long-term for eradicating comment spam. Personally, I hate having to fill in CAPTCHA fields because they
are often hard to read. So far, I've always managed to get the
word right the first time with TypePad's CAPTCHAs, so I'm gonna call
this a very good thing.

What I'd really love to be able to do is prohibit specific URLS from being used in comments or trackbacks— it's easy to fake a name, it's simple enough to use dynamic IPs,but since the URL is the only reason spammers hit blogs, blocking the links would just ruin the game for them. Also, names and IPs can be generated for free. Blocking URLs would require spam commenters to register massive numbers of domain, making spam less profitable.

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Hack One: Using the Compose Post tab to copy styles

One of the things I love most about TypePad's compose window is the ability to cut and paste text or images from other sites and maintain the formatting. The most useful aspect of this is that it often allows me to figure out how something is formatted without having to scroll endlessly through the source code for a page. It's also a time saver… Say I want to center an image— there's no easy way to do that without using CSS code in the edit HTML tab. Not a big deal, but I use TypePad largely so I can avoid writing HTML. So if I cut and paste a centered image from an earlier post into the compose window, then I can just replace the copied image with the new one I want and save the trouble.

I frequently use the compose window as a way to copy styles… I'll paste into the "compose post" window, then copy the HTML from the "edit HTML" window when I want to easily use styles in another web document. It's also a great way to format links without having to manually link to pages. Again, just a little bit of a time saver, but useful.

Hack Two: Adding new Typelists to Advanced Templates the easy way

Using the above trick, I discovered a neat little hack the other day, purely by accident. I was putting together a list of links for another site, and copied one of my typelists into the Compose Post window to save the trouble of formatting the links. I also copied the title of the Typelist… When I went into the Edit HTML tab, I discovered that the tag for Typelist titles is:

<h2 class="module-header">Participate</h2>

When you view it in the Compose Post window, it looks like this:

Participate

But when you use it in the body of a Typelist, it creates a heading that looks as though you've added a new Typelist.

Why is this a big deal? Well, one of the big complaints about Typelists is the difficulty of adding new Typelists to a blog that uses advanced templates. It's easy to modify existing Typelists, but not always so easy to find the right file name to add a new one to your template. Now you don't have to. I don't know about you, but this is gonna make my life much easier!

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