Two Useful TypePad Hacks

There were a couple of things I wanted TypePad to do better.   Once was searching and the other was opening external pages in a new window - so that visitors could easily come back to the blog after clicking on a link.

TypePad has a widget for the new browser window feature, but even though it seemed to have code to handle the situation, it opened all links - even ones within the blog - in a new window.  You can imagine how annoying this is.

TypePad also has search widgets, but they don’t work all that well either.  The biggest problem is with indexing your blog.   These sites just don’t seem to get around to indexing your blog in a timely matter.  The one that did, only indexed your 'recent' posts - with no way for you to define what 'recent' is.

The best blog search solution I found was from Yahoo - which is diligently indexing TypePad blog sites - something that I’m sure Google will do well in the future, but they’re not doing it very well right now.  After submitting my site, Yahoo was indexing it within a couple of days, and as been keeping it up to date.

To implement these solutions, I created a simple type-list called ‘search’.  In it, I included a form and button for Yahoo search.   My search type-list was also a convenient place to put my JavaScript to handle the new browser window functionality.

<!-- This script opens external links in new window --> <script> function externalLinks() { if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return; var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); for (var i=anchors.length-1; i>=0; i--) { var anchor = anchors[i]; <!-- The second if statement restricts the new windows to ones that don't match your domain --> <!-- Note that you may need to change the value of 15 below to do better URL matching for your site --> if (anchor.href && anchor.href.substr(0,7) == "http://"){ if(anchor.href.substr(0,15) != document.URL.substr(0,15)){ anchor.target = "_blank"; } } } } window.onload = externalLinks; </script>

<!-- Yahoo! Search - Add Yahoo! Search to your site --> <!-- change YOURDOMAIN.com to your domain --> <form method=get action="http://search.yahoo.com/search"> <input type="text" name="p" size=16 style="margin-top: 10px"> <input type="hidden" name="vs" id="ysvs21" value="YOURDOMAIN.com"> <input type="hidden" name="fr" value="yscpb"> <INPUT TYPE="image" SRC="http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/searchbutton.gif" VALUE="»" name="btnG"> </form> <!-- End Yahoo! Search -->