Blogging Tools Suck

It has to be said by someone and I haven’t heard anyone saying it.

I use TypePad. For everyday posting, it’s not bad. It’s been a bit slow for the past several months, but I attribute that to growing pains and scaling issues. That’s not terribly troubling to me. I figured they’ll get that part fixed soon enough.

What really sucks is the integration between TypePad (or any other hosted blogging platform) and the other services that bloggers need. Here is a list of things I’d like to be tightly integrated with my blogging platform whether its Typepad or anything else.

Google AdSense (or some other advertising service)
Google WebSearch (or some other site search/web search service)
Bloglet (or some other email subscription service)
Technorati (or some other service to see who is linking to my blog)
SiteMeter (or some other service that tells me how many visitors and page views I get)
Feedburner (or some other service that tells me who is reading my feed)

I’ve turned on a number of people to TypePad over the past couple months. Not because TypePad is great, but because it sucks less (as Brad Feld likes to say). Every single one of these people has immediately asked me how to do all or most of the above. To my knowledge, there isn’t a hosted blogging service that comes with any of this built in. Why not? I have no idea.

Even though the last one on my list is Feedburner integration, it’s at the top of my personal priority list for the following reason. I did not switch to Feedburner until I was about 9 months into this blogging thing. There are still a lot of people using my original Typepad feed and I have no idea who they are or what they are reading. I need that fixed. Please TypePad, integrate with Feedburner and let me redirect the feed to them. Then after you do that, go intergrate the rest of this stuff.

Now that Andrew Anker has joined TypePad, maybe he can help make this stuff happen. Someone has to.