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…
Category Archives: Weblog platforms
Windows Live Spaces announces features
The next version of Microsoft’s Spaces hosted blogging product will include more social networking, gadget integration, and premium options such as no advertising on your blog. The features were announced tonight in a post on the Spaces team blog. Spaces has a whole new look (pictured above) with cleaner lines and additional featured content than current spaces blogs. Your IM friends list can be exposed as a blog module showing off all their latest content and online activity. You can add the same gadgets to your blog sidebar that run on the Live.com personal homepage. The new site also…
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…
PodSession: Startup Do’s and Don’ts with Matt Mullenweg of Automattic
Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform. We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it’s best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson’s new book,…
Dave Winer relaunches Share Your OPML
Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress. The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading…
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…
FeedBurner redesign, new podcast features
FeedBurner unveiled a new look for their statistics package today and a few new features for premium members. It’s the second major update in FeedBurner’s two years as a company and affects all of FeedBurner’s 140,000 publishers. Paid members can now track more information about individual entries such as popularity of a post by day and active readers vs. feed downloads (reach). Members utilizing the free service will notice better graphical data plotted over time, JavaScript tricks that allow you to easily dig deeper into a specific user-agent, and a separate display for user-agents not in the FeedBurner database as…
Odeo audio messages
Odeo introduced some new features last week including extended profiles and the ability to send any Odeo member an audio message. I’ve been asking Ev for audio comments for a few months and I’m glad it’s finally here! Anyone with a Flash player can send an audio message to an Odeo member. You can add a special button to your podcast site and instantly collect audio comments for each episode. Choose from over 20 pre-made buttons to include on your site and you can enable audio comments in minutes. I added a “Send me an Odeo” button to my contact…
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 Open MT/App/Comments.pm inside of your server’s Movable Type installation. Search for “So we hack it” to find the commentary around…
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…