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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I like to output as much data as possible for feed aggregators, especially when one feed aggregator accounts for over 50% of my podcast listeners. I was frustrated that my podcast did not have a published duration until I realized there was a pretty simple solution: MTEntryKeywords. I almost never use the keywords field, yet it is already built-in as a storage option for every post. Perfect! No plugins necessary. Here's how you do it. Add your podcast's duration (mm:ss) as your entry keywords. Add a line to your RSS 2.0 feed: The time column will now be populated in…
Popular blog hosting provider TypePad.com was unavailable to its members for 18 hours today as a result of a failed storage upgrade during scheduled maintenance late last night. I visited Six Apart's headquarters in San Francisco earlier this evening to talk with Six Apart employees about the events that transpired and the current state of TypePad's blogging platform. I sat down for an interview with Anil Dash, Six Apart's Vice President of Professional Products, about an hour after TypePad's servers came back online. We discussed TypePad's reliability issues over the past two months, what went wrong today, and how…
Popular blog host TypePad just came back online after being down most of the past day. This outage affected hundreds of thousands of bloggers including mainstream media outlets such as MSNBC and The Washington Post. Given the high-profile status of TypePad and its members, this story is certain to be well-covered in the coming day and week. Today's outage, coupled with the performance issues of the past month, has shaken the confidence of even the most dedicated users, and many members are seriously considering taking their business elsewhere. I spoke with one TypePad member who has used the service since…
Yahoo! and Six Apart just announced a deal to make Yahoo! hosting the preferred small business host for Movable Type. Yahoo! currently hosts about 30 million individual websites including hundreds of thousands of small business sites. Yahoo! is using FastCGI, making Movable Type run a bit faster than a typical hosting install. Movable Type is available on all hosting plans including the starter $11.95 package. Users of other blogging software may have to pay $8 more for Perl, PHP, and MySQL support for their accounts. Customers can visit a special page on Six Apart's website to purchase a Yahoo! Small…
Matt Mullenweg just posted the news that About.com is switching all of its sites from Movable Type to WordPress. About.com is owned by The New York Times and has the largest public-facing blog installation of any company I know. Pretty big news for WordPress as they add another big name media site to their list….
Google Base launched last Tuesday as a new repository of information for distribution across Google's network of sites including Google search, Froogle, and Google Local. You can add your existing content to the Google Base for broad distribution with only a few easy steps. I'll show you how. You need a Google account associated with Google Base to submit items. Sign-in to Google Base to get started. Complete your extended profile. Market yourself with your full name or the name of your site, a description up to 400 characters in length, your URL, location and contact information. Create a…
Six Apart is hosting the San Francisco Perl Users Group tonight at 8 p.m. for a behind-the-scenes look at Movable Type. Byrne Reese will discuss the underpinning of Movable Type's architecture and design decisions. The meeting is free and open to all attendees. Topics Template tags Text fliters Callbacks Alternate templates MT::Plugin MT::Object MT:App Tags: movabletype, perl…
Dave Winer and Robert Scoble would like more blog outputs as OPML. I just put together a Movable Type template to output all of my entries in OPML format complete with top-level categories. I output the resulting file as my index.opml. Check out my OPML template if you would like to create a OPML output of your Movable Type install. I have not validated the OPML is perfect and valid (but I did e-mail Dave Winer), and I really should have full subcategory traversal. It's a start. Update: Dave Winer verified the output is correct and works with his browser….
Six Apart just unveiled "Project Comet" a codename for a new approach to weblogs throughout Six Apart blogging tools as an online activity hub incorporating multiple media types, multiple authors, multiple readerships, and a lower technical and psychological barrier to entry. The new technologies will be available in early 2006 as a free upgrade. Mena describes the new approach as a result of observing the variety of users across Six Apart properties and thinking of ways to increase the user base across all tools. We've taken the stuff we've learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with…
Six Apart demonstrated TypePad 2.0 at the DEMOfall conference yesterday and announced new discounted pricing. Mena Trott's mom won the coveted DEMOgod award for showing that TypePad 2.0 is so easy even your mother can do it. TypePad 2.0 is a "significant re-engineering" of TypePad. You can now apply multiple group privacy settings to a single blog to allow various visitors to see only the posts intended for their group. TypePad is also supposed to have increased media abilities, but I have not seen the product or any detailed reviews. TypePad also lowered its yearly subscription prices across all three…
Six Apart released the final version of Movable Type 3.2 today, almost a full year after the release of 3.1 on August 31, 2004. New feature highlights: A detailed user manual. New templates allow default markup compatibility across all Six Apart properties. Trusted commentors, junk folders, and simpler individual archive templates help authors fight spam while jumping through less setup hoops. SpamLookup is a bundled plugin. Reworked administrative interface including color icons and list actions. Bundled with an OpenID server as an extra feature. Atom 1.0 template is included while the RSS 1.0 template has been removed. Separate configurable…
Mena Trott just announced a new license structure for Movable Type 3.2: "all users will be entitled to unlimited weblogs. This goes for free users, as well." Six Apart's current pricing structure allows an unpaid user of Movable Type up to 3 weblogs with unlimited weblog licenses available for a Personal Basic license fee of $70. The change makes sense as it allows Six Apart to track all of its licenses based on the number of authors. Tags: movabletype…
I just finished my Atom 1.0 feed template for Movable Type. I believe it is compliant with the Atom 1.0 specification and my feed validates according to Feed Validator. Movable Type template My Atom 1.0 feed I will not switch my blog's advertised Atom feed from 0.3 to 1.0 until Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator support Atom 1.0 format. Tags: atom10, movabletype…
Guess what? There will be a new version of Movable Type sometime in the future. Six Apart will talk about some of the new features in the latest version of their software sometime between now and when it's released. They are sure you will enjoy the upgrade. Yep, that's a summary of a real announcement from Six Apart. No big surprise that there is a new version that will contain new features so I'm not really sure the point of the announcement other than admitting the versioning of the next release. Tags: movabletype…
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. 1.0 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…
