Rodent Regatta

CNET News covered the announcement of TypePad by Sixapart yesterday.

Here’s a key question:

• In addition to providing simplicity in writing, editing, designing and hosting a weblog, will TypePad do for Movable Type what web services have done for Radio from Userland Software?

Clearly, Radio Userland has features that you simply cannot get from Movable Type. They are architecturally different products. Here’s a partial list of things that I still wish for in Movable Type:

• Shortcuts – the ability to enclose a link or a graphic in quotation marks and have it render the link or graphic correctly in the final entry
• Stories – the ability to store, date and index complete stories which can then be linked to multiple times without having to locate ’long posts’ in archives to link back to them
• Weblogs.com – the traffic reports that come from being hosted on a Radio Userland server
• News aggregation with one-click posting – The ability to subscribe to an RSS feed, review all updated feeds in a news aggregator and point and click to add an entry to your weblog complete with attribution to the original author
• ’Automatic’ backup of your weblog – because the entries reside in a directory/folder structure on your local computer, you always have a backup if something goes awry at the server
• Create entries for later posting – because the entries are created on your local machine, they can be created and later FTP’d to your weblog

This might get very interesting. Now, if only I could find a way to ”import” all my original Radio entries into my Movable Type weblog.