Category Archives: Six Apart

1. Feb26

   Six Apart widget podcast with Byrne Reese

   • Enclosures
   • Six Apart
   • Widgets

   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...

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2. Oct08

   Movable Type turns 5

   • Six Apart

   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...

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3. Sep06

   Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks

   • Feed aggregators
   • Six Apart

   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...

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4. Jul23

   Zune blogs powered by TypePad

   • Microsoft
   • Six Apart

   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....

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5. Jul07

   LiveJournal adds Jabber, XMPP

   • Six Apart

   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...

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6. Jun12

   Movable Type code repository

   • Six Apart

   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...

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7. Mar20

   Six Apart announces Chinese partner

   • Six Apart

   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...

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8. Feb12

   Image submit buttons and Movable Type

   • Six Apart

   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 Open MT/App/Comments.pm inside of your server's Movable Type installation. Search for "So we hack it" to find the commentary around...

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9. Jan30

   Google Toolbar button Movable Type template

   • Six Apart

   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...

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10. Jan20

    LiveJournal XSS attack

    • Bad news
    • Six Apart

    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...

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