ON TRYING TO GIVE EDGEIO A WHIRL

TEETERING ON THE EDGE

The long-anticipated launch of Edgeio is upon us.  The new service attempts to leverage the close to 30 million blogs that are out there (see previous post), by allowing their owners to list items from sale right on the sidebars of their blogs.  As Om Malik explains:

"Edgeio leverages tags quite a bit, and as a blog publisher you need to simply add a category called listing and you post shows up on Edgeio. So from a publisher standpoint, it is pretty simple and easy to use. You can go into the Edgeio system, and add more details to your listing.

From a buyer’s perspective, find the listings and email the person concerned through the Edgeio system. You can search by geographic locations (very cool slider!!!) and by using tags. One of the best features, which I like about the service is that it can give you a small piece of code that you can then re-embed in your site’s sidebar to give people and easy view of what you are selling."

So far so good.  Following Russell Beattie's lead, I decided to give the service a whirl.  The home page is pretty clean and functional, and walks you through the basics pretty well.  I'd already set up an account a while ago, so I went directly to the step where you "claim your blog". 

And that's where I ran into trouble.

The service is smart enough to give the blogger several ways to claim their blog, the easiest being to click on the "claim via xml-rpc" button IF your blogging service supports it.  Well, by all indications my service Typepad seems to do so, since Edgeio said it did.  So I put in my user name and password, clicked the button, and...no joy.

Despite several tries, I got an internal error message a few times, along with a "blog not found message".

So, then I went to plan B, which is a geekier option of embedding some code into your web-site header and/or in one of the posts.  To cut a long story short, I tried both methods to no avail.  The service was just not able to help me "claim my blog".  And this was about 30 minutes of effort, probably longer than most mainstream users would try.

I'm not sure if something I'm doing wrong, or some glitch at Typepad, or something on Edgeio's end.  And my experience is likely not typical.  Others like Russell Beattie have been able to list stuff already.

But for now, I'm retreating from the edge, maybe to try again another day.

Comments

[Bill Burnham]

Hi Michael,

I had the same issues at first. Assuming you have TypePad Pro, you can edit your "main index" template and paste the Edgeio tag just under the: tag which is about 4 lines into the template. I tried pasting it at the end of the tag but that didn't work for some reason. Obivously your basic point about this being cumbersome stands regardless.

Bill

[Jeff Clavier]

Michael> I am using TypePad and the XML-RPC authentication worked at the first attempt for me. We are looking into similar issues that some TypePad users seem to be having.

[Keith Teare]

Hi Michael,

We have seen this bug a couple of other times today. We are looking at it. We'll post here when it is fixed. It's not a consistent pattern so taking a while to chase down.

Keith Teare
ceo/founder/edgeio

[Jennifer Hershey]

I had the same issues.