Hot on the heels of my personal blog getting picked up by the Washington Post Express paper, it turns out that I accidentally stumbled upon some info that shows that the Post uses the popular TypePad blogging service to host their own blogs.
Basically, it was all about the favicon.
I was looking over blogs.washingtonpost.com when I noticed the site's icon up in the navigation bar:
It looked awfully like the TypePad icon -- in fact, exactly like it.
So I started digging around some DNS and WHOIS info (basically the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes web page addresses work) and I found that blogs.washingtonpost.com is actually an alias to washpost.blogs.com -- and blogs.com is one of the vanity domain names you can use with your TypePad account.
Now, I'm not faulting them or anything, but it's interesting to note that the Post uses an outside service like this and not their own infrastructure.
Update: After starting this post, I did some quick research and found that they were very upfront about this and mention the technical reasoning behind it. So it's old news and my post is definitely not up to journalistic standards, but at least I find the whole topic kind of interesting. But can I say -- how about a custom favicon?
