I've been a TypePad user for a number of years. I'd signed up once before and later canceled my account and then came back to TypePad again. Now I have three blogs through the service. Yes, I pay for the privilege to blog.

With the popularity of free services such as Wordpress and Blogger, paying for TypePad may seem like a waste of money. Well, for me, nothing could be further from the truth. The fee for TypePad is actually a convenience fee in that I pay for the simplicity of access to great professional design templates and other features on my blogs. I crave simplicity, ease of use and anything that will save time. Some folks may be so advanced at CSS, HTML, and the like, that simplicity is not an issue for them but I'm not one of those folks.

One of the features that kept me with one of my blogs on Blogger was their ease of navigation that TypePad lacked. Now, with a beta version of TypePad's upgraded features, my readers can navigate from page links at the bottom of each page. That is a small but significant improvement as I am convinced many readers did not avail themselves of blog posts beyond the first page. The navigation upgrade is also available for comments,

Speaking of comments, TypePad allows for comments to be disabled on a post and to be closed. The upgrade allows a global blog feature of closing comments after one week up to one year. You can also subscribe to comments to keep up with conversations that may develop within the comments.

Those are just a few of the features and upgrades on TypePad and I love them. It's important to know that these upgrades are strictly for the users like me that don't use advanced templates or mixed media layout.

Since the TypePad folks also added new design templates, you never know what my blog will look like because it so easy to change to a new template. Anyhoo, I'm loving TypePad again. Now, back to blogging!