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TypePad lawyer blogs appear to be slowing

Those following my writing know I am a huge fan of Six Apart. Six Apart produces the blog software Moveable Type and TypePad, the Web based version of Moveable Type. An awful lot of good lawyers use TypePad for their blogs.

For those lawyers willing to spend the time working with templates and learning the ins and outs of blogging, TypePad can be a smart move for getting into blogging on a low budget with great software. I used TypePad for my original blog and learned a ton about blogging, design and formatting while tooling around in my garage near the end of my covenant not to compete with LexisNexis.

But I've recently noticed TypePad based lawyer blogs to be slower in loading. I am sure it varies by time of day and the load on Six Apart's servers but this problem seems fairly consistent over the last few weeks. In addition, the feature that allows me to look at my site traffic on my old TypePad blog is becoming impossible to us because it loads so slowly.

Six Apart had some problems with slow loading TypePad blogs earlier this year. They fixed it by what I recall adding servers and doing some engineering work on their network. If this slowing continues it will be interesting to see how TypePad addresses the problem. Six Apart is a good company and has always responded to customer needs before – I expect them to do the same now.

For lawyers using TypePad I'd watch things. If it becomes a problem, you can easily move over to Six Apart's Moveable Type loaded on servers on which you can buy space.

  • http://www.elbornes.com/iNews/ Jolyon

    Or you could migrate to WordPress, like I did, and which I tend to find a little faster in loading and, how can I put it, more streamlined in operation.
    MT is a great product, though, and I am not knocking it (or the latest pricing re-think…)
    Nice site, BTW.
    Regards
    Jolyon

  • http://lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    You're right. WordPress is an extremely good alternative built on an open source solution presently being supported by some real talented developers.
    Only issue with WordPress, and it may not matter to some people not as concerned with search engine rankings, is that I do not believe WordPress generates a static html page for each entry made to the blog. MT in effect rebuilds a site each time you post and rebuild so you have hundreds of static pages which are more easy for the search engines to spider than pages that are data base driven pages. It is this rebuilding that slows the tool because of the demand it makes on the servers but the rebuilding which may have some benefit in the search engines.

  • http://permanentred.com Harrison

    I don't think search engines have any trouble with PHP-based web. The first day I put up my new WordPress site I had several hundred megs of bandwith taken up by google, yahoo, msn, all sucking up the new site (I ported the old content)>

  • http://lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    Thanks for the feedback. No doubt PHP is becoming pretty standard. My only concern remains whether the sites can be optimized fro the search engines and retrived as high in rankings as the blog software generating these static pages.
    It is something I am going to look closer at.

  • http://www.2-downloads.com survey software

    Search engines spiders looks to links with session ID, ? & and etc. url strings like black hole, and generally it is very hard to get all content indexed by SE.
    If you are using REAL hosting ( i mean unix/linux system, and apache ) try to use apache mod_rewrite. It will solve this problems, but can be a little bit complicated for beginner to deal with regular expressions.
    Couple of years ago i saw freeware software to download, which can generate regular expressions for mod_rewrite. It helped me a lot when I was the beginner.
    Btw very nice looking design.