TypePad France
We're pleased to announce the launch of TypePad France. Thanks to the Ublog team (our exclusive agents in Europe) for helping us reach this milestone. We'll be adding additional localized functionality in the near future -- including recently updated lists limited to our French weblogs and photo albums. If you're a Francophone, sign up today.
We'll be launching Spanish next week, with other countries and languages to follow soon after.
Update: TypePad Spain launched today.
Where's the Beef?
The beta testing began Tuesday when we let the first fifty public testers into the fold. Releases, beta or final, are always an incredibly stressful time on both emotional and physical levels -- getting to this milestone was no exception.
In fact, getting to this milestone was particularly difficult, for 3.0 will be the most significant release of Movable Type since we formed the corporation and accepted funding.
During this past year, as Six Apart's visibility has increased, we've been acquainted with the scrutiny that companies 100 times our size face. We have our critics and, through the process, have gained much thicker skins. Luckily, we feel that we've operated in a manner that stays true to our intentions formed on the day we first released Movable Type 1.0. In terms of goals, we've spent our energy focused on our products and our users, and we've tried to run an operation that is both fair to our community of users and to us.
As I mentioned in this earlier post, we wish we could have released Movable Type 3.0 months ago. And, we wish we could have communicated the process that got us here more effectively. But ultimately, we're proud of the balancing act that all of the members of Six Apart have done during the past year and we don't have too many regrets about what we should and should not have done. Instead, we choose to focus on the future of the products.
So there's the stress of being the "new Six Apart" and then there's the stress of releasing a version that will probably receive a certain sort of feedback that can be summarized with one phrase:
"Where's the beef?"
Well, it's my intention to use this post to answer that question and explain more about the path that Movable Type is taking.
Silicon Valley WebGuild Talk
Ben and I will be speaking about weblogs and our products at the Silicon Valley WebGuild on Wednesday, April 14th at 7:00 pm at the Cypress Semiconductor building in San Jose. Admission is free for WebGuild members, $5-$7 for non-members.
Support System
Those who have visited and used the Movable Type forums at great length will no doubt recognize the names bmk, girlie and Kadyellebee. Almost since the inception of the forums, these three women have played a pivotal role in supporting the growing base of Movable Type users. These three made it possible for us to continue developing Movable Type and then proceed to start developing TypePad.
BMK, Girlie and Kadyellebee (or rather Brenna, Shelley and Kristine) were volunteers who wanted to help support our community by helping the countless numbers of new users who hadn't a clue how to chmod or install a Perl module. They started as new users and over the course of the past couple years, became experts on Movable Type.
