Category Archives: Six Apart

Movable Type 3.1 has been released and is now powering this weblog. :) The new Movable Type Plugin Directory is live as is the Six Apart Professional Network….

The Six Apart Professional Network is live but bare bones at the moment. Plugins directory will relaunch soon. Some interesting things to note. Plugins tested with Movable Type 3 will receive a special mark. Yes! It looks like the TypePad account will no longer happen and will instead be discounts available for “Network members who qualify.” Movable Type 3.1 should be released this afternoon….

Movable Type 3.1 is four days from release. The Six Apart Professional Network will launch concurrently. After the Labor Day weekend work will inevitably start on the next version of Movable Type. What would you like to see in the next version of Movable Type? If Six Apart does not build your wish list item, a member of the professional network just might build it for the community and/or profit. If your feature is already present in other software, please provide a pointer for background information….

This week my comment spam has outpaced my e-mail spam. The comment spammers use varied IP addresses, so an IP block does no good. MT-Blacklist is not working for me at the moment but hopefully I will have it installed when the final bits ship with Movable Type 3.1 next week. MT-Blacklist blocks comments based on keywords and link usage, not just IP block. How bad is the problem? Only 7.7% of the comments submitted to my site are legitimate comments. I could restrict to only TypeKey comments, but even a Six Apart employee does not use TypeKey when leaving…

Movable Type 3.0 introduced the MTIfNonZero template tag. If you would like to take action in your template only if a tag has a non-zero entry, use MTIfNonZero for valid XHTML. Example: <MTIfNonZero tag=”MTEntryCommentCount”> <ol> <MTComments> <li><MTCommentAuthorIdentity> wrote something.</li> </MTComments> </ol> </MTIfNonZero> MTIfNonZero tag is currently not listed in the Movable Type template tag documentation but should be and it works….

Six Apart on Monday issued a press release about the upcoming Six Apart Professional Network. Over 1,000 people have pre-registered to join the network. Anil Dash’s title changed from vice president of business development to vice president of the Six Apart Professional Network. Although the network was announced it will supposedly not be live until Movable Type 3.1 launches….

Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist 2.0e today. The new version is compatible with Movable Type 3.0x releases but not compatible with 3.1 beta. As the developer of the #1 Movable Type plugin I am curious how the licensing and donation system is working for Jay. Jay asks for $100 per author for commercial use of the plugin and $5 per author for educational and non-profit use. For a 5 author installation with each author using MT Blacklist Six Apart would receive a licensing fee of $200 and Jay would receive a licensing fee of $500. As the perl hacker/source code reader…

Movable Type 3.1 adds Technorati to a list of selectable pings. Currently Movable Type weblogs can ping weblogs.com and blo.gs if the option is selected in their configuration space. My configuration screen does not currently show the Technorati ping option, but the hooks are in the code and database. [Update 8/17: The Technorati checkbox appears in the configuration space starting with version 3.1b2]…

When Movable Type 3.0 was released on May 15 a professional network was planned and better communication with developers promised. The Plug In to Movable Type 3.0 Developer’s Contest came and went and to developers not attending the BlogOn awards ceremony it seems the network remains silent. The contest page has not even been updated with the list of winners. Two months later and Six Apart may have succeeded at getting developers out of the woodwork. Designers, consultants, IT/IS managers, and enthusiasts are still untapped areas of the idealized network. Movable Type 3.1 highlights the ability of independent developers through…

Farhad Manjoo wrote an article about the history Six Apart for Salon. I never realized that the events of September 11, 2001 made Mena think that blogging was a bit trivial. I feel the opposite is true. When a major event happens people are looking for an outlet. Craig’s List was full of postings from people coping with what just happened. My relatives in Ireland wanted to know how we were reacting and what changed. Everyone was watching and listening for the latest news. If the entire point of creating a blog is to talk about yourself, or to get…