Today, we’ll look at how to create TypePad blog posts. TypePad gives you a number of different ways to do this.

Finding the Post Editor

You can go to your “Home” tab and you will see all your blogs listed in the QuickStart box, at the moment we only have one blog listed.

In the QuickStart box, in the blog listing, you’ll see a “Begin a new post” link, you can click on this to get up the blog post editor.

You can also click on the “Weblogs” tab a similar looking box will come up, again with a “Begin a new post” link.

And… when you click on your Blog’s name, here it’s the “Commerce Shop” link, you’ll get some new tabs and you’ll see on the left hand side, a number of “Weblog Shortcuts”.

In the Weblog Shorcuts, there is a “Create a new post” link - click on this to get to the post editor.

There are probably more ways, but that should be enough.

Creating your blog post

When you get to the post editor, you’ll actually be in a “Compose” tab. You’ll notice that we’ll labelled certain parts of the page with a number - all the numbers in brackets eg (1) in this Creating your blog post section refer to the image numbers below.

The most important parts of your blog are the title (1) and the post body (2). The title (1) is what sells your readers on reading your blog posts so make sure it’s interesting! The Post Body (2) is where you write the content of your blog post.

Formatting your blog post

TypePad has a What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) post editor switched by default so it’s basically like working with a simple version of your word processor - this is also known as a “Rich Text Editor” and in the blog post editor it’s the “Compose Post” editing tab. If you want to edit the webpage’s code more directly, there is an “Edit HTML” tab - you can switch between both of them just by clicking on the tabs.

In the Rich Text Editor, you have many of the same formatting options as a word processor (3) - just select the text and hit the “B” or the “I” or the “U” or the “S” to get Bold, Italics, Underlined or Strikeout formatting respectively. You can also make your text smaller or larger.

Creating links

Still in the formatting buttons (3), you might notice a button with a picture of a piece of chain link on it. That’s your link button. Select some text that you want to make into a link and then click the link button.

You’ll get a popup asking you to enter the URL of your link - do so and click “OK” and it will make the text you selected link to the URL you entered.

Create a link to an email address

It’s a similar procedure to set up a link to an email address so that when someone clicks on it, their email program will open up automatically.  Select the text you want to make into your email link and click the button that looks like an envelope. You’ll get a popup asking for your email address.

But be careful about putting your email address online - it’s a surefire way to get lots of spam.

Add a quote

Your theme may have special formatting to indicate that you are quoting someone.

How quotes show up on your blog depend on your theme’s design but this is an example of quote formatting on this blog.

Look for the quotation marks buttons on the formatting bar (3). To apply this formatting, you just need to highlight your quote and hit the Begin Quote button to put it into quotes. 

You can also see these buttons as indent and outdent buttons. If you find yourself indented after a quote and need to outdent, click on the End Quote button to return to normal.

Bulleted and Numbered Lists

Click on either the Unordered List button or the Ordered List button to make bulleted or numbered lists.

Add an image

Place your cursor where in your blog post you want your picture to be placed then click on the button that looks like a framed picture of a mountain.

You will then get a popup with a number of options. Click on the “Choose File” button to find your image on your hard drive.  Then decide on how you want your picture to display. It’s a good idea to experiment with the different settings to see how you like them. It’s really up to your taste and your blog design.

Add a link to a file

Click on the button with a picture of an arrow and a document:

You will get a popup. Choose a file on your hard drive and click on “Upload File”.

TypePad will automatically upload this file to the TypePad’s servers and in your blog post it will create a link that says “Download yourdocument.doc”. When your reader clicks on this link, they will download the document. (If you need to remove this document from TypePad’s servers, then you need to go to your Control Panel tab, click on the Files sub-tab and look for your blog’s folder, click on this, then inside click on the “files” folder. You should find all your files listed here, select the file you want to remove and click “Delete”.)

Check Spelling

To get to the spell checker, 

Make your editing window bigger or smaller

You can adjust the window by clicking on the “Bigger” or “Smaller” links (4).

Schedule your blog posts

If you click on the Posting Status (5) drop down - you’ll get three options. If you select “Publish Now” and you save the post, it will publish the post (ie make it public) straight away. If you select “Draft”, then it keeps it as a draft and doesn’t publish it (or removes it from publication if you had published it previously). But what’s really cool is that if you have the $8.95/month Plus package or above, you can schedule your posts to be published at a specific time in the future using “Publish On…”

Select “Publish On…” and you’ll get a pop-up where you can specify the time and date some time in the future for the post to be published automatically.

This means you can prewrite your blog posts at your convenience.

Opening/Closing Comments

You can choose to:

• not to have any comments (None)
• to accept comments (Open) or
• accept comments (Open) then close off comments (Closed) and it will keep the comments already published

 

Trackbacks

Trackbacks are notifications that a blog post has been linked elsewhere - usually these show up in the comment section or in a special trackback section.

If you tick the “Accept TrackBacks” box (7), when someone links to you, a link to their page which linked you will show up in a trackback section on your blog post. 

There are a number of reasons why it is a good idea to allow trackbacks: you and your readers can see who is linking to you, you provide incentives for people to link to you (as they get a trackback), if you have a number of trackbacks it can help build your authority in the eyes of your readers. The downside is that it can be abused by spammers so you may need to moderate it.

You can also send trackbacks for blogs you’ve linked to using the box below (8). 

Assigning Categories

Categories help keep your blog organised and make it easier for your blog readers to look through related posts. 

In TypePad’s post editor, you can assign categories using the Category drop down (9).

To assign the post to a new category choose “Add a new Category…”

You will get a popup, enter in your new category’s name and click “Add” to both add a new category and assign your post to this category.

If you want to assign your post to multiple categories, choose “Assign Multiple Categories…”

You’ll get a pop up of all your blog’s categories. Hold down the Ctrl key (Windows) or the Command key (Mac) and use your mouse to click the multiple categories you want to use.

Display Settings

In the bottom right hand corner you’ll find a link to “Customize the display of this page” (10). If you click on this, you’ll get a number of options that affect your editing and viewing options.

Editor Mode: This sets the default editor mode. It should be set to “Rich Text (WYSIWYG)” editing by default - this lets you apply formatting and see the results straightway just like a normal word processor. You can also select “Plain text” and that will show you all formatting in HTML code by default.

Screen Configuration: We have gone through all the options available in the Basic Screen Configuration but you can choose “Advanced” to have more options in the editing window - or you can choose “Custom” to select only some of the Advanced options.

Button Bar Position: You can choose whether the Preview, Save, and Delete buttons appear toward the top or whether they appear on the bottom of the page

Advanced Options:

•  Extended Post: if you use this option, TypePad will give you two windows “Post Introduction” and “Post Continuation (Extended Body)” - What you write in ”Post Introduction” will show on your blog’s homepage and on the post’s individual page, what you write in ”Post Continuation (Extended Body)” will only show up on the post’s individual page. It’s best used for long posts where you don’t want the whole post on your blog’s homepage.
•  Excerpt: Try to keep this to no more than 160 characters, this is used for search engines and will likely be the text that Google will use for its search page results if your blog post is listed.
•  Keywords: Choose words that are relevant to your blog post that you want to rank for
•  Technorati Tags: Similar to keywords
•  Feature This Post: This will keep this post at the top of other posts on your blog’s homepage
•  Text Formatting: You don’t need to worry about this, it’s set to the default “Convert Line Breaks” which is fine. “Markdown” is another way of marking up text to be viewed on the web (you can read more about it here but it’s not recommended for beginners).
•  TrackBack URLs to Ping: This is already included with the Basic Layout above.

Preview and Save
To see what your post will look like when it’s published, hit “Preview”.  When you hit “Save”, what happens depends on your Posting Status:

• if it’s “Publish Now” then saving will immediately publish your post;
• if it’s “Draft” then saving will just save a draft of your post, but will not publish it;
• if it’s “Publish On…”, saving it will publish it on the date that you have set.

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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.