TypePad Widgets - A Day Late and a Dollar Short For Me

In June 2004, I wrote a post called Blogging Tools Suck.  At that point, I had been blogging about nine months and was getting increasingly frustrated with the hacking I had to do in TypePad to get other services integrated into my blog.

I asked for easy integration of things like Feedburner, Technorati, Adsense, Sitemeter, and Search.

Since then, I’ve learned how to edit the templates, put HTML and Javascript into my templates, and even play around with CSS. I really never wanted to learn all of that, but I had to in order to get everything working the way I want it to work.

Well almost two years later, TypePad has sort of answered my request with TypePad Widgets.  There are about thirty widgets right now including Feedburner, Indeed Jobroll, Indeed Job Search, Technorati, and Feedblitz – all services that I already have on my blog but had to get there the hard way.

The cool thing is that this is based on an open API so any web service that wants to integrate with TypePad can add a widget, just like Feeburner’s Feed/Site Flare service.

Since I have most of the services that I want on my blog already that there are widgets for, I decided to use the Bunchball widget to add Pac Man to my blog sidebar.  Unfortunately TypePad Widgets doesn’t support advanced templates yet.  And the very reason I converted to advanced templates in the first place was to integrate these kind of third party services.

Ouch, that hurts.