Have you got a big pile of data sitting somewhere you wished was in a nice, neat, web browse-able format? Bored of forever tinkering with Access or Excel? You might need to look no further than TypePad.

In last week's article on news galleries, I mentioned my realisation that TypePad (particularly the Pro version) was capable of much, much more than producing weblogs with a few fancy features.

The first time I woke up to this was when working out a way to position the 70x70px images you see on the front page and at the top of each post. I wanted them to the left and level with the top of the headline.

This effectively meant I couldn't place the image in the body field (unless I started playing around with CSS relative positioning. And trust me, I did, and it got very messy).

I reasoned the only neat way to do it would be to use another field and structure the page like this:

Image field	Headline field
	Intro field

So I opened up a help ticket to ask if there were any plans to add an image field to weblog entries and Brenna said, What? You mean you've used up all your other fields?

That was the slap-the-forehead of course moment. Just because it says "Title" or "Body" or "Excerpt" on the TypePad "compose a post" form doesn't mean you have to put a title or body or excerpt in those fields.

It may seem obvious now, but jumping that hurdle made it so much easier to complete the design of smallworldmedia.co.uk. And once I'd finished I started looking for ways to push the concept further.

****

My mountain blog book

You need TypePad Pro for this.

In a few weeks time I'm off to Plas Y Brenin to be assessed for my Mountain Leader Award. Part of the assessment involves producing a logbook to demonstrate I have the required experience to be given the ML ticket.

My log book goes back 10 years. It started out on paper and was transferred last year, in a mammoth effort, onto an MSWorks database. Considering all the work it took I was rather disappointed with the result. It felt clunky entering new data, no one else could see a copy unless they were sat at my laptop and the report printing never really worked perfectly.

So I thought it would be an interesting project to see if TypePad could cope with organising this sort of information.

There was no way I was going to enter a decade of trips into TypePad manually, so the first job was to import the data. Getting an MSWorks database into a format TypePad could read may be easy for some, but I'm a real amateur at this sort of thing. I finally managed on the sixth attempt and after about as many hours. I've had more enjoyable Sunday afternoons.

To complete the import successfully I had to map the data. This is what I record in my logbook:

• Mountain region
• Status: Leading, personal or winter (it's important I can filter by status e.g. I need the ability to print or view all the trips when I was leading a group)
• Comments
• Camps
• Group details (optional - only filled in if you are leading a group)
• Other: Equal, solo or member

And these are the data fields available in TypePad:

• Date
• Title
• Categories
• Body
• Extended body
• Excerpt
• Keywords

It wasn't that hard to match them up:

TypePad field		Logbook field
Date	=	Date
Title	=	Mountain region
Categories	=	Leading, personal or winter
Body	=	Comments
Extended body	=	Group details
Camps	=	Keywords
Categories	=	Other: equal, solo, member

Then it was just a question of tinkering with the HTML in advanced templates to put the fields in the correct places. The result is here (the site is mostly for personal use, so the design is functional rather than pretty).

Category archives - Leading, for example - are formatted as printer-friendly tables, as they have to be printed off for the log book I hand into the assessor.

You could push the reporting even further if you wanted, by creating more templates and using the MovableType filter and sorting tags. When I get round to it I also want to produce a stats page using the MT count tags.

What else could you use this for? Any sort of data really, as long as you don't have more fields than TypePad can cope with - e.g. documenting personal libraries or CD collections, creating shared contact lists, trip reports, inventories...

And what would make it better? It's only cosmetic I suppose, but it would be useful to have the ability to change the field names in the TypePad "compose a post" form. You can already choose which fields to display, so why not have the option to change the field titles as well?

Comments are welcome as always, especially thoughts on what could be achieved with this sort of approach to TypePad.

*****

Please be polite and on-topic

It is indeed a nice realisation once you make it. I power my photo gallery page this way - http://stormfront.typepad.com/photographs/ - with the image, title and link in various fields all in a blog. The drop-shadow is a standard background-image. Each actual gallery is a photoblog at the moment though it could easily be a Category (but then you loose the handy ZIP upload for images). TP (or rather MT) really can do some good stuff when you think out of the box.
Paul Watson, 6 August 2004

Nice site, Paul. I really like the drop-shadow effect and neat captioning. Good pictures, too!
Chris, 6 August 2004

Would be nice to see a way to add arbitrary metadata to typepad without worrying about trying to find correspondence with the preset fields. It's possible to do this in Moveabletype using the MT-meta plugin.
Mikel, 11 August 2004

I'm doing the same at http://hiphop.blogs.com/directory/2004/04/hip_hop_blogs.html I also wish there were more fields to add info into. I'm tinckering with comments on/off funtion to do more with the site other than comments.
Hashim, 11 August 2004

No doubt about it, Mikel - being able to use any MT plugins with TypePad would be pretty cool.
Chris, 12 August 2004

I used this approach to insert differently styled small links among larger pieces of commentary. See my post "Kottke mode (integrated lists & posts)" http://www.metagrrrl.com/metagrrrl/2004/05/kottke_mode_int.html
Dinah, 14 August 2004

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