Recently in Six Apart Category

Weblog software by Six Apart including Movable Type, TypePad, TypeKey, LiveJournal, and Vox.

  1. Feb26

    Six Apart widget podcast with Byrne Reese

    Last Friday I visited Six Apart's headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart's four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox.

    Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below.

    Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart within this page using Flash.

    TypePad

    TypePad logo

    TypePad is a hosted blog service with basic and advanced templates available to authors depending on their paid subscription level. Basic templates take advantage of a drag-and-drop sidebar manager, letting blog authors insert and rearrange widgets from the TypePad widget directory without directly editing the underlying template HTML. TypePad accounts at the Pro level or above can edit their template HTML directly through TypePad advanced templates, placing any widget code anywhere on their pages.

    TypePad authors can browse available widgets in the TypePad widget directory from the TypePad admin interface or select a compatible widget from TypePad partner site Widgetbox. Widget publishers can add widget content directly from their site using the TypePad widget API and a valid partner service key.

    Web feeds and advertising widgets are the most popular widgets on TypePad. Authors like to make money, and they like to integrate content from across multiple sites of interest or other areas of online activity such as their latest photos on Flickr or a music playlist from Last.fm.

    Movable Type

    Movable Type logo

    Byrne developed the Sidebar Manager plugin for Movable Type, integrating the drag-and-drop simplicity of module management into the administrative interface of self-hosted Movable Type software. The Sidebar manager plugin was built into Movable Type's core code starting with version 3.3. Movable Type treats widgets as a special type of template module, grouping appropriate sidebar content for your blog homepage, category listings, or individual entry pages.

    Movable Type plugins allow third-parties to integrate content and functionality directly into the blogging application and output their content directly into each generated HTML page. Movable Type supports static generation of blog files using Perl, or dynamically generated pages using PHP (or both), letting plugin and widget developers utilize available features to create the best possible integration experience.

    Byrne has not seen many developers taking advantage of the plugin + widget management features of Movable Type, but perhaps it's just an education hurdle.

    LiveJournal

    LiveJournal logo

    LiveJournal has a user base that is very security focused, taking a conservative stance on the trade-offs required when including third-party code on their journals. In the past year LiveJournal has opened up a little bit, whitelisting a few widget publishers for inclusion in LiveJournal templates. LiveJournal compiles its user templates, removing any unknown JavaScript entered by an author before the file is saved to disk. A whitelisted widget passes through this filter and is available to LiveJournal's over 12 million authors.

    External widgets can only be added to LiveJournal after the code is reviewed and approved by Six Apart staff. The best way to get whitelisted for inclusion on LiveJournal is to initiate a partner discussion with the Six Apart business development team.

    Vox

    Vox is a closed system and a very controlled environment, and only Six Apart authored widgets are currently available on this new blogging system. Vox may open up in the future to allow third party widget content in its author admin interface.

    Summary

    These are just some of the topics covered in my 25-minute podcast with Byrne Reese of Six Apart. Listen to the full audio to hear our thoughts on popular widgets, widget business models, and what widget functionality we might expect from Six Apart in the future.

    I hope to make this type of developer interview a regular feature, providing direct information about developing widgets on popular widget platforms.

  2. Oct08

    Movable Type turns 5

    Movable Type logo 2001

    Five years ago today Benjamin Trott and Mena Grabowski Trott released Movable Type 1.0. About 100 copies of the blogging software was downloaded within the first hour of availability, and over 500 people had requested notification of each release.

    We've never claimed to be the best.

    We've never presented MOVABLE TYPE as the program that will revolutionize weblogging.

    We're just developing a system with a lot of the features that we've heard users are looking for.

    Luckily, we've received a lot of good word of mouth. People are hoping that MT will be THE program and THE solution.

    A brief history

    Movable Type launched Six Apart, a company that originally made money through paid custom installs, donations, and commercial licenses. The company later hosted its own version of Movable Type named TypePad, selling monthly subscriptions and licensing the hosted group blogging software to companies around the world. Six Apart bought LiveJournal in January 2005. Six Apart has recently been working on Vox, its first blogging software written from scratch with the resources of a 125-person company.

    Happy birthday Movable Type and Six Apart. Five years seems like such a long time looking back before the multiple VC rounds, women baring their breasts in protest outside the office, Christmas parties, and over 100 employees around the world.

  3. Sep06

    Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks

    Six Apart Vox logoRojo Networks logo

    Blogging company Six Apart has acquired online feed aggregator Rojo Networks. Rojo technologies will be integrated with the Vox blogging tool allowing users to browse updated content and create more blog posts. Rojo co-founder Kevin Burton confirmed the news on his blog this morning.

    A press release from Six Apart names former Rojo CEO Chris Alden as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type and former CTO Aaron Emigh as executive vice president and general manager of core technologies. Chris Alden is the fifth general manager of Movable Type in the last year. The press release is all about Chris and Aaron without much mention of Rojo technologies or feed syndication in general.

    Rojo launched its online aggregator at the original Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Rojo currently includes tagging, Ajax, and Digg-like functionality for every post. You can browse your friends' feed subscriptions or search the full content of all feeds in the Rojo database.

    The acquisition gives Six Apart both a feed reader and feed search engine. Rojo will help generate more pageviews, allowing Six Apart to further leverage its newly created advertising network covering LiveJournal Plus accounts and Vox. Six Apart may bundle the Rojo service with its licensed personal blogging service currently powered by TypePad. Six Apart currently licenses TypePad software to companies around the world such as Le Monde in France and Nifty in Japan. Rojo's software could be bundled into these licensing deals or command a higher licensing value for Vox when it is launched and ready for redistribution.

    Rojo is written in Java, a departure from Six Apart's preferred code base of Perl. The site does use LiveJournal's memcache caching system.

    Expect Six Apart to keep acquiring small companies as former-VC Andrew Anker enjoys that sort of thing and consistent cash flows from subscription services give the company good leverage.

  4. Jul23

    Zune blogs powered by TypePad

    The two Microsoft blogs discussing the upcoming Zune product suite, Zune Insider and Madison and Pine, are powered by Six Apart's TypePad blogging software. That's Apache on Linux using Perl and PostgreSQL.

    Microsoft is heavily into "dogfooding" everything, from Windows Mobile smartphones to the latest build of Vista. It's good to see the Xbox team step out and blaze their own path.

  5. Jul07

    LiveJournal adds Jabber, XMPP

    Frank feels chatty

    LiveJournal will soon rollout a Jabber service to connect its over 10 million users and content generated on the service. LiveJournal users can authenticate against the service using their LiveJournal username and password to connect to their online friends and receive real-time alerts on new posts and comments. Users will also be able to post to LiveJournal using a special chat bot. The team plans to federate the service to other networks, allowing interoperability with users on Google Talk and other compatible clients.

    The new service should be able to support Atom notifications over XMPP. Developers should be able to authenticate against the server and pull out a LiveJournal friends list, allowing anyone to pre-populate a feed aggregator with feeds from your online friends.

  6. Jun12

    Movable Type code repository

    Six Apart opened up Subversion access for its Movable Type blogging tool. The new code repository provides a real-time mirror of the team's internal code base.

    Movable Type is an enterprise product with enterprise release schedules of about one update per year. The new code repository allows Six Apart to more actively engage its bleeding edge users while still maintaining a QA process, internationalization, and the same license/business model.

    Open source competitors such as WordPress have of course had open code repositories for years and Movable Type might now be more attractive to developers it is losing to WordPress and other blogging tools.

  7. Mar20

    Six Apart announces Chinese partner

    Six Apart is partnering with blog hosting company Bokee to localize and distribute Movable Type in China. Bokee (formerly known as BlogChina) means "great, open minded person" in Chinese.

    Leading Chinese search company Baidu estimates there are 36.82 million blogs in China authored by 16 million unique bloggers as of November 2005. The same study found 658 blog service providers in China and 330 providers with over 1000 registered users. MSN Spaces currently leads the market.

    Bokee has been vocally opposed to the spread of MSN Spaces in China and what one Bokee employee calls a "Microsoft monopoly" of blogs in China due to its agreements with the Chinese government.

    We call on the national monitoring departments to increase their monitoring and supervision of MSN Spaces, especially with respect to their illegal offering of content services in order to restrict its monopolistic practices.

    We call for the vast number of blog service providers and traditional portals to put aside their sectarian interest, and set up Chinese blog service standards and open up the Chinese market in order to oppose Microsoft monopolizing 2.0.

    Bokee laid off reportedly laid off about 1/3 of its workforce the week before Christmas and plans a billion dollar IPO within the year if they are not first bought by Yahoo! or Google for a rumored $200 million.

    China's a tricky business but Movable Type is a good first step into the market for Six Apart due to its hosted nature which places more responsibility for the content on the publisher and not the tool provider.

    Tags:
  8. Feb12

    Image submit buttons and Movable Type

    Do you use Movable Type and want to submit forms using an image? You'll need to edit your Movable Type installation to work around a 4 year-old bug.

    Movable Type is listening for the "post" or "preview" parameter but if you use an image as a submit button these parameters have x and y values corresponding to your mouse click. You need to teach Movable Type how to listen for these different parameters before your comments will work.

    Fix it

    1. Open MT/App/Comments.pm inside of your server's Movable Type installation.
    2. Search for "So we hack it" to find the commentary around the code in question.
    3. Include post.x and preview.x as valid inputs by copying the code below.
      if ($q->param('post') || $q->param('post.x')) {
        $app->mode('post');
    } elsif ($q->param('preview') || $q->param('preview.x')) {
        $app->mode('preview');
    }

    You can now use image submit buttons for your Movable Type comments.

    Tags:
  9. Jan30

    Google Toolbar button Movable Type template

    Want to create your own Google Toolbar custom button? If you use Movable Type just copy and paste this template code into a new template ending with "xml".

    Users can view your Atom feed from the toolbar, search your blog from the Google search box, or select text on the web page and click your blog button to find out what you have written about that topic. Your icon will be the Movable Type wrench unless you change it.

    Once you have generated the file, just add a special link to your blog to let your readers add your button to their Google Toolbar install.

    http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url= + [your file location]

    Tags:
  10. Jan20

    LiveJournal XSS attack

    Frank LiveJournal goat

    A group of crackers named Bantown claims to have hijacked 46% of LiveJournal's active accounts, over 900,000 total, via a cross-site scripting attack according to Brian Krebs of The Washington Post. The group was able to steal the cookies of LiveJournal users clicking on links created by the group on their hundreds of automated journal accounts. LiveJournal altered their URL structure last night to allow each user to have their own private cookie domain.

    The Bantown group continues looking for sites to BBQ, or swap user profiles for something a bit more sexual, often involving farm animals. Some of the exploit code has been released as open source, allowing others to build upon the holes found at LiveJournal.

    LiveJournal users were alerted to the problem when McAfee Internet Security Suite installed on their machines threw up warning messages about a possible exploit.

    Tags: ,

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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