Professional Network Launches August 31

Aug 16, 2004 - San Mateo, CA - Six Apart, the maker of award-winning Movable Type and TypePad weblogging software, today made two announcements intended to support the robust community of webloggers that are actively using the company's software throughout the world. Six Apart announced the creation of the Six Apart Professional Network as well as the winners of its "Plug In to Movable Type 3.0 Developer's Contest." The Six Apart Professional Network is a collection of resources for the community of developers, designers, consultants, IT/IS managers and enthusiasts who build on top of Six Apart platforms such as Movable Type, TypePad and TypeKey. In less that two months, over 1,000 people have pre-registered to join the network. In addition to receiving early release of the Movable Type software, members will have an online channel to promote and sell their products and services to customers worldwide, as well as having a mechanism to interact directly with other Professional Network members and the Six Apart team. "The innovation and camaraderie exhibited by the thousands of Movable Type developers, designers and consultants led us to create this network," said Ben Trott, Six Apart's co-founder and CTO. "We want to draw them closer together, giving them ties to each other and to Six Apart to share and discuss their work, as well as give them a way to market their products and services. We're excited about formalizing this network of creative people and moving forward together to bring the immediacy and fun of weblogging to the mainstream online world." Six Apart named Anil Dash, formerly Six Apart's vice president of business development, as vice president of the Six Apart Professional Network, responsible for fostering an active dialogue within the Six Apart developer community and with the company. Weblog developers, consultants and designers can go to www.sixapart.com/network to apply for membership in the Six Apart Professional Network. In addition, Six Apart announced the winners of its "Plug In to Movable Type 3.0 Developer's Contest," which gave developers a chance to compete for $20,000 in prizes by submitting innovative plug-ins that take advantage of the powerful and extensible architecture of Movable Type 3.0. Entries were judged on the basis of the plug-in's applicability to the broadest number of users, its robustness, ability to integrate with other software and the overall design. The winners are: First Place: * Jay Allen for MTBlacklist, a comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and TrackBacks, complete with a management interface and remote importing of blacklist entries. Second Place: * Tim Appnel for XSearch Plus, both a complete framework for plugging alternate search engines into Movable Type and a robust implementation of a Plucene-powered search engine. * Andrew Sutherland for KoalaRainbow, an advanced visualization/graphing engine for displaying post stats or weblog status in a graphical manner, complete with its own query language. Third Place: * Chad Everett for Notifier, which lets a weblog's readers subscribe to email notices whenever an update occurs to a post, a category, or an entire weblog, providing a vital part of the weblog communication loop, and including full support for managing lists and user opt-out. * John Gruber for Markdown, a simplified text description language that lets both technical and non-technical authors use plain text to create rich, valid XHTML formatting. * David Raynes for MultiBlog, which builds upon the power of Movable Type's support for multiple weblogs by allowing users to include content from one weblog within the template of another blog, or combine the contents of multiple weblogs into one aggregated view. About Six Apart Ltd. Six Apart Ltd., based in San Mateo, CA, is the company behind the Movable Type publishing system and the TypePad personal weblogging service. Founded by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott in 2002 and funded by Neoteny Co., Ltd., Six Apart creates tools that enable hundreds of thousands of individuals, organizations and corporations to participate in the Web's full potential by publishing their ideas on the Internet with simple, yet powerful software and services. For more information about Six Apart, TypePad and Movable Type, visit the Six Apart corporate weblog at www.sixapart.com. Contacts Krause Taylor Associates (for Six Apart) Barbara Krause, 408-918-9081 (Direct) 408-918-9080 (Main) barbara@krause-taylor.com