typepad gets a major upgrade (v.1.6)

Indeed something weird was happening on my blog yesterday: the system was generally slow, and my homepage and category homepages looked really weird. Actually they looked weird with Firefox but still looked OK on Internet Explorer. Didn't have time to work on it yesterday, and discovered this morning that actually a new version had been released, and that the folks at SixApart were playing around:

Please note that immediately following this release, we began a process to rebuild everyone's weblogs.

I wonder whether they had sent us an email before (I don't think I got any) telling us about this maintenance work on the site. Hey... I use the site all the time. A warning on the back office might have been good ? I subscribe to over 300 RSS feeds, and the Typepad news feed is not necessarily the one I read first. Imagine all those folks that actually run a business or very serious matters on Typepad ?
But image to have their layout completely screwed up for a few hours! I guess Barak and his team will make this a top priority next time. Anyway, Typepad's site tells you how to manually republish your site: I guess this is something you want to do right now. I just did.

Now a few comments on what is new with this release:

Increased bandwidth limits and storage limits for everyone!

Nice but it never seemed to be a problem, as you can easily go over your limit without warning ;) A better response time of the pages would be better.

New Instant Message status side bar

Nice. Too bad MSN, SkypeIM, Jabber and IRC are not supported yet.

TypeKey support!

At last. Good.

Stop the presses, don't publish that comment!

Great improvement.

Comment Notification Email improvements

I like the new 'delete this comment' directly embedded in the email. Very handy.

More emails converted to HTML
HTML or Plain Text emails

OK. But no big deal.

More themes!
Custom CSS
Copying advanced template sets
Enhanced Design Area:

I don't change my layout too often. Not really concerned.

Publishing is more automatic
Rewritten weblog preferences page
"Warning! You have unsaved changes.

Nice, but not existentially challenging.

More Local Vendor options

This is great. They should really add more of these: integrate Typepad with Google's AdSense program instead of Kanoodle, with Kelkoo's shopping engine, etc.

Easier localization
More detailed transaction histories
Mini-FAQs abound!
Those tables are clean enough to eat off of!

Good, but not for me.

What I still want is here in a post I wrote 3 months ago. We thought that Typepad was not improving because many of these features asked by the blogosphere were not coming to market. Keep it up guys, I'm sure you'll make us all happy in no time.