Category Archives: Weblog platforms

Flickr adding ranking algorithms within the next month

Stewart Butterfield announced a new Flickr feature at tonight’s Tag Tuesday event. In the next few weeks Flickr will introduce the ability to algorithmically sort photographs using criteria such as the most commented posts, the most popular photo publishers, and the structure of a user’s social network. The new ranking system will allow for the most active pictures surrounding an event to rise to the top of the pile instead of treating an entire tagspace as a chronological flow.Tags: flickr…

del.icio.us tags by file type

Del.icio.us now allows users to browse tags by media types such as MP3 files or MPEG movies. RSS feeds now include enclosures for easy media subscription. The tag “system:media:audio” includes: *.mp3 as “system:filetype:mp3” *.wav as “system:filetype:wav” The tag “system:media:video” includes: *.mpg as “system:filetype:mpg” *.mpeg as “system:filetype:mpeg” *.avi as “system:filetype:avi” *.wmv as “system:filetype:wmv” *.mov as “system:filetype:mov” The tag “system:media:image” includes: *.jpg as “system:filetype:jpg” *.jpeg as “system:filetype:jpeg” *.gif as “system:filetype:gif” *.png as “system:filetype:png” The tag “system:media:document” includes: *.pdf as “system:filetype:pdf” *.doc as “system:filetype:doc”Tags: delicious, tagging…

Google Sitemaps using Movable Type

It’s pretty easy to make an XML Sitemap of your blog for easy parsing by Google or other search engines. Just create a new index template and copy the code below. Choose an output file that is easy to remember such as sitemap.xml. Save and rebuild your new template file once you paste the code. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″> <url> <loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml=”1″$></loc> <priority>1.0</priority> </url> <MTEntries lastn=”9999″> <url> <loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=”1″$></loc> <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc=”1″ format=”%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ”$></lastmod> </url> </MTEntries> </urlset> Now you need to let Google know where to find your sitemap. Open up your web browser and enter http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + the URL-encoded location…

Movable Type 3.17 released

Six Apart just released version 3.17 of Movable Type, a minor bug fix upgrade. From the changelog: Nofollow plugin version 1.2 fixes “a bug in the nofollow plugin which causes HTML sanitization of everything within an <MTPings> block.” Finally! The nofollow code is licensed under The Artistic License if anyone wants to tweak and rerelease. mt-db2sql.cgi now has better handling of subcategories. I like the availability of a changed files document to save me time….

Anil Dash in New York Times wearing a goatse shirt

Anil Dash appears in the Thursday, June 2, edition of The New York Times posing in the Six Apart offices wearing a goatse t-shirt. I think it’s in bad taste to appear in a national publication in your employer’s offices while wearing apparel promoting pornography but that’s just me. (via Boing Boing)Tags: goatse…

Customizing default ping options in Movable Type

Movable Type allows you to easily publicize your blog by pinging Weblogs.com, blo.gs, and Technorati with each post. Movable Type administrators should view these three built-in services as default options that can be easily changed for each Movable Type installation. Think of the three checkboxes above as three variables: BlogsPingURL, WeblogsPingURL, and TechnoratiPingURL. These variables can be overridden in your Movable Type configuration file (mt.cfg) by adding a line with the variable name and value. Each replacement server must be a valid XML-RPC ping beacon similar to Weblogs.com. BlogsPingURL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ Adding the line above to your mt.cfg file will send…

One year since Movable Type 3.0

A year ago today Six Apart launched Movable Type 3.0 and introduced their new pricing structure and rebranded as a publishing platform. The announcement resulted in over 800 TrackBack links. Each Movable Type download had yielded $0.38 and the company decided it was time for a new pricing structure. Six Apart underestimated the community’s reaction to the change. The commercial license pricing remains unchanged a year later while the personal licenses are a lot cheaper than originally announced. Six Apart has since introduced educational, non-profit, developer, and single author personal use licenses for their software….

Blogger enterprise edition?

IDG reports on some possible future product direction for Blogger. Nothing terribly exciting we could not have guessed on our own, but Google does confirm they are dedicating resources to a possibly entry into Blogger for corporations. Google is also weighing whether to develop an enterprise version of Blogger that would be tailored for workplace use, as opposed to individual consumer use, Stone said. It’s something we’re always thinking about, something we have a few people thinking about and looking into. It’s definitely being researched he said.Technorati Tags: blogger…

WordPress 1.5.1 released

WordPress 1.5.1 is now available for download. The new version features extended pings, better Atom output, and much better handling of international character sets. I helped with some bugs that were fixed within a matter of days. If you are a developer who loves open source, WordPress is written in PHP and has an active community that really cares about their tools. They really do need the ability to export, and I might write that in Atom….