I need your help testing two new sites. The first site is a new blog called WordPunk.com — hosted on the for-pay TypePad blog service owned by Six Apart — you can click on the following image to be taken straight to the feedback article:

I’d like to know how fast and responsive WordPunk feels to you as well as what is missing from the design and feature set and what you like and don’t like and what sort of articles you’d like to read there.

If you have any questions at all about any of this please ask here or there and I will answer you there or here. The second site is WordPrescience.com — and while there’s a “blog” on that site, too — it is not fully functional through no fault or design choice of my own.

WordPrescience was created using the new iWeb ’08 software from Apple’s iLife ’08 and it is hosted on Mac.com as part of their new “Personal Domain” service. You will see WordPrescience is quite beautiful and the design is slick and professional looking — but its interactive capability is limited in that I can’t find a way to save a blog page as a template or to moderate comments.

I currently have to “re-create” my blog pages with each new post. That’s a time killer and a productivity thorn in my writing paw. I can enable blog comments on WordPrescience — but there’s no way to hold them for publication or to otherwise parse them to help fight Spam other than having you fill in a silly captcha — so if you have any comments or thoughts there please come back here to share them in a comment on this article. Thanks for your help!

21 Comments

  2. Hi marks, arin, thanks for the analysis!
    WordPunk does load fast. Not any images there yet. I’m not sure I like how TypePad appears to require you to upload all your images to their servers instead of making it easy to remotely call them from your own personal server.

  3. I have the WordPrescience site up to test everything with iWeb ’08 and as an interesting aside, I had the domains swapped.
    WordPunk used to point to .Mac and WordPrescience was on TypePad! I switched them around because I plan to update WordPunk more frequently and that wasn’t possible on the iWeb ’08 personal domain hosting for the reasons we’ve mentioned here.

  5. funny you swap addresses what does wordprescience mean do you know its hard to type?

  6. arin —
    Interesting question!
    I chose WordPunk because it was available 😀 and it seemed appropriate :mrgreen: and it used to point to http://BolesBooks.com until I decided to separate it and take it live as a URL of its own.
    I’m not sure what sort of content will appear there so if you have any suggestions, shout ’em out!

  7. arin —
    Yes, the domain swaps were smoother than I thought they would be… It took 5 minutes to set up and 2 hours for everything to point at the new servers.
    I know “WordPrescience” is a mouthful to say and type and that’s why it’s best left on the .Mac hosting where it won’t get much play except for pretty looking — “wordpunk” is so much easier to hear and type and remember.
    I guess “WordPrescience” was inspired by “WordPress” on some level — and might have been and could still be an excellent URL to use for reviewing blogging.

  8. arin —
    I forgot to answer you about the Tip Jar. That’s sort of a neat feature from TypePad that lets people send you “a little something” for the work you do on your blog. It’s only available on the more expensive hosting choices.

  9. UPDATE:
    I just found out from TypePad support that URLs for blog entries are limited to 15 characters, so my post today there titled:
    “Teasing WordPunk on TypePad”
    Has this as the URL:
    http://www.wordpunk.com/2007/08/teasing-wordpun.html
    Ugly and unfortunate and the URL even changes the meaning of the title in an un-punny way!
    WordPress.com uses your entire title for your URL and that makes for cogent meaning in a URL where the words you choose are the words that become you.
    Beware of the new “import” feature of WordPress blogs into TypePad — because if your posts have URLs longer than 15 characters, your blog posts will be truncated by TypePad and all your existing links and trackbacks will be broken.

  10. Teasing WordPunk on TypePad

    Thank you for reading post and helping me tease WordPunk.com on TypePad. I would appreciate if you’d bang around here a bit and see if you find anything broken or if you there’s something missing that should be added. If

  12. Thank you, my lovely Katha, for your expert feedback!
    WordPrescience does look good. It loads for me here in a little under 8 seconds. That’s slow.
    WordPunk loads for me here in 2-3 seconds. That is pretty fast.
    Thanks for the help!

  14. Going great guns so far, dang, now you got me saying it.
    Both sites look good at first perusal. I like the WordPrescience layout and design. Weird on why the blog part works funky.Does the book load last when everyone sees it or is it just me?
    Wordpunk looks good, not had much contact with Typepad, I tired Movable Type on my domain but just am used to WordPress so stuck with that.
    I have enough trouble keeping two blogs I don’t know where you find the time with all the great stuff you do.

  16. Michael!/Mik?
    Is that you? I never made the connection between the now you Michael and the former you Mik of NonSensicalFlounderings.com!
    I visited your new site and I certainly remember your Favicon from our author’s page of a lifetime ago! 😀
    I thought you gave all this up and were moving back to the UK?
    I thank you for your fine comments on the two sites.
    WordPrescience is an Apple template. It’s beautiful and it does load pieces of the layout in strange and unusual ways — sort of in layers… like stacking books on a table…
    I’ve been hearing great things about MT4 and so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about over at TypePad.
    Since TypePad is all-for-pay blog hosting I expected it to defeat Blogger and WP.com in every category. It does not.
    TypePad does do some interesting things, though, so I’m still looking around and poking to see what squeals.
    Your comment about “going great guns” is appreciated 😀 and for those who haven’t been there yet, you are kindly referencing this post:
    http://www.wordpunk.com/2007/08/going-great-gun.html
    What is your other blog?
    It is strange running 3 blogs on three different services, but it’s important to stay on the edge and informed about these kinds of things in my line of work.
    This blog is about the urban core, The Boles University Blog is about Education and Technology and WordPunk is just that… me punking around on words and stuff that probably wouldn’t be appropriate on this Urban Semiotic blog.

  20. Great Things About TypePad

    I’ve had this WordPunk blog on TypePad for a week now and I’ve made clear the things that concern me as a writer as I try to decide if buying into TypePad hosting is really worth $300.00 USD a year.

  21. Pingback: WordPrescience.com is now WordPunk.com! | WordPunk

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