This feature is currently available for Blogger in Draft (Google’s eternal beta for Blogger)–or at least it was until Google disabled it after experiencing various bugs.

(Blogger in Draft) Update (1/21 @ 8:54 PST): We’ve temporarily disabled creating & editing pages. You can still view the pages you’ve already created. We will re-enable ability to create and edit pages soon.

Despite the bugs (ranging from rendering issues to blank pages) this upcoming feature should help Blogger convince users to stay and blog upon their platform (instead of switching to WordPress.com and perhaps Squarespace as well).

Although Blogger is currently the world’s most popular blogging platform (WordPress comes in at a distant second) the service still has quite a ways to go in order to match against its smaller rivals (especially in the comment spam arena as CAPTCHA’s are dead).

Hopefully we will see Google continue to innovate this service, which has helped millions of users (this author included) embrace blogging as the norm instead of a hobby performed by geeks.

While the company is already making plans on unleashing the next update for the iPhone app (which will include comment moderation–just like their rival WordPress), the company is currently taking a “wait and see” approach when it comes to Android–despite the demand.

(Jeff from Squarespace) To those asking: We do not have plans for an Android app at this time — we’re waiting until the platform is a bit more polished before we jump in. Perhaps a bit later in 2010.

Jeff made these comments in December before Google launched Android 2.1 within the Nexus One.

Hopefully the Squarespace team reconsiders embracing Android sooner, as “Droid lovers” currently have no way to natively blog upon their various Google phones–not even via third party apps.

Users have been complaining about errors logging into their Typepad blogs via iPhone for quite some time (which I confirmed after trying to log into my blog and receiving the error to the right).

While users can still access their Typepad blogs via BlogPress, CellSpin and Shozu, it’s sad to see Six Apart (seemingly) abandon their native iPhone app (although to their credit they still support the web interface over at i.typepad.com).

Hopefully Six Apart will reconsider continuing support for the native app (or committing serious resources towards it), as their absence leaves the field wide open for WordPress and Squarespace (not to mention a host of third party apps).

Update: Colleen brings the good news that the Typepad iPhone App is alive and well, with Twitter integration as well!

For those unable to login, try reinstalling the app (as that resolved my problem).

Here at BloggingPro we hope that everyone had a wonderful start to 2010 and are happy to announce the winners to our ‘2009 End of Year Giveaway’.

To determine the winners we used a simple PHP random query and selected the winners for every price from all the people who followed BloggingPro on Twitter and retweeted our entries over the last days of the year or who left a comment. Winners will be DM’ed via Twitter and are requested to submit their details ASAP so we can forward the details to our sponsors.

Once more BloggingPro thanks all our sponsors who made the giveaway possible and we are already working hard at organising new giveaways for 2010!

The 2009 BloggingPro End of Year Giveaway Winners!

The winners will all be contacted over the next hours via Twitter and stay tuned for more news, interviews, tutorials and giveaway in 2010! Continue following BloggingPro on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook, future giveaways might be pre-announced exclusively on one of these platforms!.

We know that most of you don’t want to be bothered while counting down to midnight (At least, we don’t. Hehe), so we’ve decided to make the final part of our giveaway short and simple.

For today, we will be giving away four club memberships to Elegant Themes, a popular themes club for WordPress owned by Nick Roach. As a member, you’ll get unlimited access to their premium and high-quality elegant themes!

How To Enter The 2009 BloggingPro End of Year Giveaway?

To participate to today’s competition and win one of the four memberships, all you need to do is to follow BloggingPro on Twitter (we will check) and tweet about the BloggingPro giveaway (Click this link to have both links included!).

Today’s competition will be closed on December 31st, 2009 at 23:59PST. Winners will be randomly chosen and announced here on January 3rd 2010!

Advanced happy new year!

In order to have a system like this, each canonical plugin’s development community would probably need similar infrastructure to WordPress itself, including things like Trac, mailing lists, support forums, etc. These things will be worked out within the development community over the coming months…

If the community decides to open up the platform more this could have great advantages for these plugins but it would only restrict the damage done daily elsewhere. The inconvenience of being a popular open source platform with extensions and themes directory: popular plugins become orphans, themes aren’t updated with the newest features and could break a standard WordPress setup with new releases.

All themes and plugins hosted on WordPress.org are required to be GPL licensed so it would be simple for developers, designers to re-release ‘updated abandoned’ plugins and themes but users would not receive updates in the plugin and themes installer.

Enter GitHub. GitHub is a popular distributed platform used for many opensource software projects. Rails uses it, scriptaculous and Lussumo garden are other popular projects using GitHub. The SourceForge of the modern internet.

Git is a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software.

GitHub is the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development, all with ease.

Where GitHub excels is the possibility to follow projects and also to fork a project, all while keeping the project leader informed of contributions.

I am not saying that GitHub the future of the themes and plugin directory is, but GitHub does offer an easy platform to overview many different projects. If a plugin or theme becomes orphaned, chances that someone else has created a fork are big and ‘repository moderators’ could opt to replace the main, original plugin with an updated commit.
A GitHub similar platform would also offer an easy platform for theme designers and child-theme designers to keep ‘connected’. It literally becomes easy to follow a plugin’s or theme’s history (themeline?) and to download new commits.

Could WordPress.org benefit from a similar setup?

2009 has been a very great year for TypePad. The developers have worked really hard in making the TypePad experience better. Some of the best features they’ve released so far are listed below:

• Add a TypePad Favorite button to your blog and let your readers show the love
• Add video with the click of a button
• The easiest way to blog? The new TypePad bookmarklet and microblog themes
  
• Manage your blog on the go with iPhone, Pre, and Android mobile blog support
• Full TypePad integration with Facebook Connect for sharing and commenting
• New widgets to supercharge your small business blog from FormSpring, Freshbooks, andBookFresh
• TypePad goes real time with PubSubHubbub support
• Engage your blog readers with the TypePad Follow widget
• Add Userpics (or Avatars) to your comments
• Launch of TypePad APIs and TypePad Motion communities
• New Themes! Pico, Magnetic, and more in Beta
• And of course, the biggest of all, the new TypePad. Check out the TypePad overview from Professor Wibbels.

Now that the year is almost at an end, the developers are once again asking the community: What new features do you want to see on TypePad for next year?

If you’re a TypePad user who has something in mind that could improve the platform, then go ahead and leave your comment on their blog by going here. Who knows, your idea might get picked and appear on the next update of TypePad!

Just today they added a video about adding twitter updates to your sidebar, which is an insanely popular thing to do these days. Check it out below, and go to WordPress.tv for more.

We’ve implemented a fix in trunk for the XML RPC issue some WordPress app users have experienced. I’m looking for volunteers who have had that problem (not being able to add a blog and getting an XML-RPC type error).

What I need to do is test the fix to be sure I’ve caught any edge cases. This means either A) temporary access to your blog with at least Author-level permission, or B) for you to run the simulator with the latest code.

If you have an iPhone and would like to help them out, you can get more info at the original post, or the related forum post on the WP for iPhone forum.

Here’s what they have to say about how things are going so far…

We have 18 plugins announced so far for the competition, with at least five posts in draft stage (so at least five other plugins waiting to be posted). If you have written a plugin since the start of the competition (1st of May) and are looking for some more exposure for you and/or your plugin, read through the rules, signup on the plugin competition blog and post your plugins.

If you did not know this already, there is over $3000 in cold hard cash to be won in the competition! Generous donations made by WPMUDev, BuySellAds, WPWebHost, White Shadow and Ozh have made the awesome prize pool for the competition a reality. Thank you to all the sponsors, developers and authors for helping us make this event a reality.

Sounds like some fun stuff will be coming out of this contest. Should be very interesting to see how this pans out and what sort of creative plugins gets developed (whether they are the winner or not).

There’s still time to get in on the contest if you’re a plugin developer, but only weeks. Better get to it!