VNUnetblog (gee, what a great name, congratulations, that’ll get you nice blog URLs with that, easy to remember) is an opportunity to try Typepad for free, without a time limit, as long as you can live with VNUnet’s design and ads.

Nevermind the couple of bugs, or the lacking default setup (was it too much of a bother to set the right date format and timezone?); in the end I’m rather disappointed by the interface. I shouldn’t have been surprised: I have long thought that a platform’s interface and layout influenced the quality of its users’ posts, but I assumed that Typepad, being so expensive, would be an exception. The price should have been enough to deter everyone but geeks serious about their blogging, and there was no need for such an austere, complex and counter-intuitive interface. Why is it such mess? Why don’t they create a default blog so you can start writing as soon as you registered? Why are options and functionalities scattered and hidden all over the place? The MovableType legacy is much more of a burden than I thought.

I’ll keep on recommending Blogger (with the Blogspot hosting option, because experience showed you’d better not give them you FTP password if it matters to you).

P.S. The Garoo Blog advises that the personal dislike by its editor, Garoo, against the SixApart France subsidiary and its president, Loïc Le Meur, could but does not influence the reporting of this company at the Garoo Blog.