Setting up your blog’s preferences

Go to your Preferences section in the Configure tab

The Front Page of Your Blog

Usually, blogs display the most recent posts on the front page - but you can choose to have a page as your front page - for example, introducing yourself and highlighting the best posts for a new visitor. Having a Front Page can work well sometimes, but usually it’s safer and more reliable to just go with the default option of displaying most recent posts.

How many posts display

You can customise how many posts or how many days of recent posts you show on your front page up to 50 posts or 365 days. Be very careful that you monitor this - number of posts is the safer option to ensure that you don’t have too many or too little posts on your front page. 5-20 posts is the ideal number depending on how long your posts are. 

Order of posts

You can choose to have posts display as newest or oldest first. Newest is the default option and what we recommend - that way readers coming back to your site will always see the newest posts, instead of having to wade through all your old posts to get what they want.

Customise your Navigation links

A nice feature of TypePad is they let you customise your Navigation links. By default, you get “Previous | Next” but your can put in whatever you like such as “Newer | Older”, “Back | More Posts”, “Newer Posts | Older Posts”, “Forward | Backwards”. Just remember that it needs to be clear to your reader what the link means or it will just confuse and annoy them!

Limiting recent posts by categories

By default, all your posts are shown - but you can limit this to one or more categories.

Localising your content

You can also choose from a number of languages if you are serving a non-English speaking background as well as the date and time formats that best suit your culture.

Setting Defaults for New Posts and Pages

Posting Status

You can set your default posting status to “Publish Now” or “Draft” - this just means when you save a newly created post, it will either publish straightaway or be held as a draft. You can still change how your post/page saves on the post’s/page’s editing page.

Text formatting defaults

By default, your text formatting is set to convert line breaks - it’s fine to leave it as that. You can also choose to have no formatting (may be an option if formatting clashes with your theme which is unlikely) or you can use a special type of formatting called Markdown. You can read more about Markdown in TypePad’s Help and on their blog.

Feed Excerpt Length

If you publish feeds of your blog, and you choose the short except option, this is where you can set the length of your excerpt. By default, it’s 40 words, which isn’t very long. You could try 150 or 160 words which is more likely to suck readers into actually reading your feed and being interest in finding out the rest of the post.

Save Changes and Republish

Remember you’ll need to save and republish your blog!

Next up, we’ll go through how to back up or export your TypePad blog.

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This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.