Six Apart News & Events: September 2004

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

Hi, I'm Mark Paschal, a software engineer here at Six Apart. You may know me as markpasc from the MT Support Forum. Here I'll share some of the tools I use in my development work, as well as some of the intranet tools I had a hand in setting up here at the company.

Continue reading 'Behind the Scenes - Mark Paschal'...

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

I'm Brenna Koch and I work in technical support for Six Apart. If you're curious, "Cook" is how you pronounce my last name. I usually hear "Cotch" since that's how it is said in some areas and I also hear more ah... interesting variations. But now you know.

We have many browsers around in the support department but my favorite is Safari. I utilize keyboard commands with my bookmarks bar for fast access on the sites I use all the time like my test weblogs and pages in the help system admin.

For email I use Mail. Configuring rules on incoming mail is essential for me to stay organized and the rules in Mail are the best.

Then, iCal is useful of course for keeping track of my schedule, but for general to-do items I post into a TypePad weblog with the "Publish on" feature. I'm subscribed to the feed and receive the update in my news reader as a reminder when the day arrives.

NetNewsWire is my favorite for keeping up on news and the 2.0 version (beta) has all these cool new features like flagging items and searching--I'm just loving it!

I like Konfabulator for a couple of extras and my favorite widgets that I use every day are iChat Patroller, mini Weather, and Da Emails (because it shows unread mail from my sub-mailboxes).

Spike is handy for note clips that I need often, and I recently set up Instiki for my personal portal, notes, and works in progress. I've been putting almost everything I need on pages in Instiki now.

Six Apart support is growing fast with new users as well as staff and having these tools at hand helps me to help you!

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

There are many worthy tools and technologies that make my job much easier as a server engineer. Kickstart, yum, and yam for rpm management, cfengine for server cloning, and cacti and nagios for monitoring. For me mod_perl is one of the most useful and most underrated technology platforms out there. We use it to make Typepad run quickly, and it can do the same with your Movable Type blog too.

Continue reading 'Behind the Scenes - Paul Lindner'...

MIT's Technology Review magazine publishes the Technology Review TR100 list every year, naming their view of the top innovators under 35. This year, they've named Six Apart's co-founders Ben and Mena Trott to their list of computing innovators, and the description for the category says it all: "Computing is all about creating better connections—whether between tiny transistors or human beings".

The TR100 story also includes a brief profile explaining how Ben and Mena were chosen.

Just as the Atom API can be used to publish data to either Movable Type or TypePad (as well as many other publishing tools for weblogs, wikis and journals), an Atom syndication feed can be used to export your weblog's information in a consistent, well-specified format.

Right now, the Atom format is fairly similar to the RSS format in the range of things that are possible, but for many developers, one of the positive traits about Atom support is the documentation for the format.

In addition to an IETF Internet Draft, there's a test suite for clients which support auto-discovery and a feed validator to verify that your feed is correctly formed.

For most people using Movable Type and TypePad, though, you can just use the built-in support for Atom feeds and things will work right out of the box. The default Atom template is available on the Movable Type website as well.

People who are interested in participating in the Atom community, which helps define and give feedback on both the feed format and the API, might want to follow the excellent Finally Atom blog, or just check in on the Atom wiki for links to the rest of the conversation.

Next up, we'll start to cover how you can use the Atom support in Movable Type and TypePad for your own applications.

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

Someone asked me recently what was the most important tool I use in the course of my work. The answer to that is unequivocally "emacs." I could talk at great length about all the services that emacs provides, and how its built-in scripting language allows you to do all kinds of interesting things in terms of customization and tool-building within the emacs framework—and still it performs well for any editing tasks (a lot like a certain piece of blogging software). I could talk at great length about that, but I'm not going to.

Instead I'm going to talk about list-objects, and about using perl instead of sed to make substitutions in a shell pipeline, because I can never remember the quirks of sed (and maybe you can't either). This will be especially interesting to people who haven't done much development but would like to start poking around in their Movable Type internals, and developers who feel like they've been encumbered by the lack of a good way to go poking around.

Continue reading 'Behind the Scenes - Ezra Cooper'...

Most bloggers who use Movable Type and TypePad know them as publishing tools. And most developers know Movable Type can be extended through plugins or by customizing templates. But there's another way to look at both platforms, and that's as a collection of web services for developers to use.

Fortunately, doing so is a fairly straightforward matter. Both TypePad and Movable Type are AtomEnabled, meaning they can use the Atom syndication format for output and the Atom API for entering information into the system. This Atom support is in addition to the existing support that both tools have for the XML-RPC API and the RSS syndication format, both of which are still fully supported.

We'll be looking more at Atom support over the next few days, but it makes sense to start with the basics of the Atom API. To familiarize yourself, you'll want to read the TypePad Atom API documentation. Though they're not in their final version yet, they provide a solid overview of what's available. And since versoin 3.0, Movable Type offers the same Atom support, except for Photo Albums and TypeLists which only exist in TypePad. Ben Hammersley's done a good job of documenting this support.

Once you've read over the documentation as well as the latest IETF draft (that one's a little bit tougher to read), you might want to start thinking of how you can use Movable Type and TypePad as a collection of publishing-related web services available through a common API. Check in this week as we'll look at some ways to make that work easier and more automatic.

CM Pros, a community site for content management professionals, has just launched their redesigned website. Besides being an interesting resource for people interested in CM, they've also included a complete description of the process used to create their new site.

Chuck Olsen, known for his work in creating the Blogumentary documentary about weblogs, just posted his Blog History on his TypePad site. Jumping from 1999 back to the 18th century and all the to the present, it's a great look at the medium from a idiosyncratic point of view.

Blog star Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame posted his own advertising policy for his site last week, establishing some sane and reasonable guidelines for advertising on his site. It's a good step towards transparency, and will hopefully act as a useful template for future policy posts by other bloggers who are contemplating adding advertising to their sites.

An interesting conversation popped up at Jeremy Zawodny's venerable blog, where he's asked which web services Yahoo should offer. Though he works for Yahoo, he's not asking in an official capacity.

Jeremy helped the Yahoo! Search blog get set up with Movable Type, so he clearly knows the power of the weblog platform. Maybe there's some good suggestions to be made about how to connect blogs to Yahoo's range of services.

In what seems to be an increasingly popular idea, moreover is offering contextual ads in their free RSS feeds, which will probably spark the ongoing discussion around ads in XML feeds in general. According to their press release, "By working closely with the developers of leading RSS readers, Moreover is able to intelligently deliver contextual advertisements through RSS without filling a news folder with advertisements every time a feed is refreshed."

While they're not more specific about the details, it seems clear that some feeds in the future around going to include ads, which makes it seem likely that ad-blocking and filtering technologies that have been created for web browsers may start showing up in aggregators and syndication clients as well.

One positive note is that including ads in the feeds won't make all the posts reappear as new updates within a feed reading client.

From a story in today's New York Times, Lisa Napoli uncovers Marisa's American Idol Audition Training Blog, a TypePad-powered site covering Marisa Olson's attempt to get on the popular TV show. Marisa is, in addition to auditioning for the show, a Ph.D. candidate in film and digital media at UC Berkeley, which seems like great preparation for being a blogger.

Good luck to Marisa, and here's hoping the producers of the show let her keep blogging once she's made the show.

The German newspaper NEWS-Frankfurt started printing excerpts from blogs in their new publication aimed at "generation iPod" and predictably stirred up a storm. Given how frequently weblogs quote each other and display excerpts of each other's posts, what are the right guidelines for print publications that want to do the same thing?

Ranchero Software just announced a beta of MarsEdit 1.0, a new weblog editing application for Mac OS X. MarsEdit already works with Movable Type and TypePad, and given the popularity of Ranchero's NetNewsWire, MarsEdit seems destined for success. NetNewsWire's been updated as well, and judging just from the praise around the office at Six Apart, it's shaping up to be a worthy upgrade.

Next week's Web Essentials 04 conference in Sydney is turning out to be one of the most impressive conferences in some time. With contributions from a number of members of the Six Apart Professional Network and luminaries from the worlds of web design and web standards, it seems like it will be well worth checking out.

If you're attending, some of the speakers that you'll want to catch up with include Doug Bowman of StopDesign, and Dave Shea of mezzoblue and Bright Creative, who helped create the new mixed media templates that were a key part of the recent update of TypePad.

Annalee Newitz argues in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that weblogs are taking over television by having the tone and immediacy of reality TV shows. While the point's probably debatable, her discussion is certainly entertaining, and there's even a mention of Wendy Seltzer's excellent Movable Type-powered weblog, Chilling Effects, which monitors the legal machinations surrounding fair use and intellectual property on the Internet.

Joshua Schachter, the creative madman behind the del.icio.us social boomarking service (as well as sites like memepool and the GeoURL service) has just launched del.icio.us news, a Movable Type-powered blog for news about his service. Since del.icio.us shares a lot of common users with TypePad and Movable Type, it's definitely worth checking in on, particularly since Joshua just added support for posting your del.icio.us links to your weblog.

The BBC follows up on this week's crackdown on reformist websites in Iran, reporting that many weblogs are promoting reformist newspapers by adopting their names and reprinting their articles, since the papers' own sites are being blocked. As with many of these protests, much of the effort is being coordinated by Hoder. Good luck to all of you fighting against censorship with your blogs.

A couple of announcements from some companies making syndication clients today... first, NewsGator Technologies announces a new CEO, J.B. Holston, with founder Greg Reinacker becoming CTO of the company. And Nick Bradbury's announced that FeedDemon has partnered with Moreover to integrate their feeds into the application. Congratulations to both companies.

Kevin Hale's done some cool work in building a live search of posts for Movable Type. He's got a demo running on his weblog, unfoldedorigami, where you can enter search text into the box and watch the entries filter themselves as you type. (Try typing in the word "name" for an example.)

Always at the forefront of adopting blogs, Guardian Unlimited boasts two new additions to their stable of Movable Type-powered weblogs, The Guide and a newly-relaunched Newsblog.

D. Keith Robinson's at it again, with his new Guidelines for Linking, a helpful overview of how to do links right. A great reference to bookmark for the future.

Tim O'Reilly is interviewing heavy hitters like Jeff Bezos and Adam Bosworth for his panel at Web 2.0 and wants to know what questions he should be asking. Got any suggestions? Let him know.

And if you're attending Web 2.0, you can check out our own Andrew Anker, who's on the "Architecture of Participation" panel on Thursday afternoon.

Andrew Sullivan, one of the highest-profile bloggers around, talks up the power of the medium in this week's Time, describing A Blogger's Creed. Clearly, as Time explores in its stories, bloggers have a big role to play in improving other media while legitimizing their own. Be sure to check out the blogs linked in the piece, including John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson's PowerLine and Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, both powered by Movable Type.

Erik Barzeski is looking for a polling plugin to work with a Movable Type-powered blog that he's working on. Given the success with DropCash campaigns for plugins in the past, maybe it's time to start fundraising for functionality again.

Alan Kleymeyer has collected a few interesting links about using weblogs in education over on his TypePad site.

As part of its larger package on syndication and weblogs, eWeek's current issue reviews Movable Type 3.1 and summarizes their review with this:

Movable Type 3.1 shows why Six Apart is a leader in blogging software. The product adds authoring features that give users more control over the display of content. In addition, new dynamic publishing capabilities allow IT managers to optimize the performance of Weblogs.

Also worth checking out in the story package is a cautionary story about RSS hype, which points out the work that we as an industry need to do to improve the syndication experience for users and to improve the reliability of XML syndication so it's appropriate for use by even more businesses and institutions.

We're proud to see Movable Type recognized for its strengths, and glad to note that there's a lot of area for improvement left for our entire industry to make progress on in the future.

Anne Chen of eWeek describes how Compassion International uses their XML feeds to spread information within their relief organization. It's fantastic to see people doing important work being able to streamline their communications processes using tools like TypePad and NewsGator.

Brandon Fuller's whipped up a great new plugin called MT-Enclosures, which adds support for enclosures of large media files in RSS feeds. Brandon's even put together a demonstration of how to use Movable Type with his plugin to publish an MP3 blog, which sounds pretty darn cool.

Frank Barnako of CBS MarketWatch notes that, bloggers need to be careful when noting their accomplishments in influencing traditional media.

Macromedia's just released Macromedia Central 1.5, the latest version of their Flash-based development platform for cross-platform rich internet applications. Formerly code-named Gemini, Central now includes a range of new features that build on top of its existing functionality.

Central's always been very blog-friendly, including the ability to easily do things like read XML feeds, and it's definitely worth looking at if you'd like to connect a rich internet application to Movable Type or TypePad.

In the wake of Mozilla Firefox's newly-added support for Live Bookmarks, there's been a flurry of activity culminating in Feed Your Reader, an extension to Firefox which passes your Live Bookmarks to the feed reader of your choice instead of Firefox's built in XML support. Thanks to Nick Bradbury for the link.

Steve Makris gives an overview of Nokia's moblogging initiatives, talking to Christian Lindholm about how they're working with TypePad and what Nokia's vision is for the future of moblogging. As Christian says, "It's whenever, wherever and you manage to capture those little life moments that can be of great importance later."

Paul Carr, the editor-in-chief of the Friday Thing makes a compelling case in the Guardian that bloggers are good for profits. There's a clear demonstration of a model based around giving access to bloggers who want to link to a publication's stories, and he's even backed it up with his publication's 20% increase in paid subscriptions. Impressive results.

Ben Goodger, a leader of the Mozilla Firefox project, took some time on his weblog to explain in more depth the idea behind the Live Bookmarks feature in current versions of Firefox.

The XML feed-reading functions in Live Bookmarks have been taking some flack lately for their implementation, and this overview of the concepts that inspired the feature gives a good perspective on what the Forefox team was trying to accomplish.

Most people in our community know Wil Wheaton as much for his terrific use of the weblog medium as much as for his time on teh Starship Enterprise. But for people who are new to Wil's current life and his sites, this terrific profile of Wil does a great job of talking about his projects, his motivations, and his Movable Type-powered weblog.

This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

Continue reading 'PHP Dynamic Publishing: Architecture Overview'...

Two of the most prolific people independently documenting Movable Type are Arvind Satyanarayan and Elise Bauer, and now they've teamed up to write a terrific new tutorial that appears on both of their sites.

With the addition of Movable Type's new PHP support and dynamic publishing features, knowing a little bit about how the .htaccess file controls your Apache server's configuration can go a long way to helping streamline the display of your dynamic pages. Take a look at this great new tutorial, complete with screenshots, to get a fuller picture of what's possible.

ABCNEWS.com had Michael J. Miller of PC Magazine review the Highlights of DemoMobile 2004 and he's listed the demonstration of TypePad working together with Nokia's Lifeblog as one of the most impressive demonstrations at the event.

Johnathon Williams just described his experience with TrackBack on his TypePad blog in The Power of TrackBack, where he was able to promote the ideas in his post just through the linking and networking that comes naturally through use of TrackBack. As Johnathan says:

TrackBack is one of most democratic features of blogging, because it allows small voices to speak alongside big ones. Instead of being based on who you know (like most blogrolls) TrackBack is based on what you have to say.

Hossein Derakhshan, better known in the weblog community as Hoder, is reporting on a crackdown on reformist websites in Iran. As the weblog medium has grown in power and influence in Iran, there's been a backlash against its influence. Hoder is asking for help in publicizing the crackdown, since attention can only help to spread the ideas that are being censored.

Iran is showing some of the highest potential and power of weblogs, and here's hoping that opennness continues to have a positive effect.

Running Movable Type 3.1x on Windows? You'll want to check out Lutz-R. Frank's tutorial on setting up post scheduling. It's a fairly straightforward set of directions for getting your posts to pop up right when you want them to appear.

One slick idea that might make a big improvement is getting these steps to work with the built-in Windows scheduler.

Prompted by John Gruber's list of mt.cfg variables, Phil Ringnalda explored some mt.cfg values in a bit more detail, including OneHourMaxPings and OneDayMaxPings as well as TempDir and TransparentProxyIPs.

Until we've gotten around to documenting all the possible variables in mt.cfg (we want to get them all documented, honest!) Phil's work here serves as a terrific guide.

Even hipster record reviews are giving a nod to the influence of blogs, with a new record by the Junior Boys getting acknowledged not just for its music, but also for its credibility amongst music bloggers. How long until we get our first bona fide rock star from the blogosphere?

The Detroit Free Press' Mike Wendland takes a look at some of the best blogs in Michigan, including sites like Melissa Schott's Movable Type-powered anything but ordinary.

Dave Winer raises some good questions about the proper way for those who are publishing XML feeds to force unsubscriptions for readers, and Nick Bradbury points out a fairly clean solution that has the advantage of already being implemented in the wild.

Publishers should simply an HTTP Status 410: Gone code, and the aggregator or syndication client will know to do the proper thing and unsubscribe. The next version of Nick's tool FeedDemon is scheduled to add this support.

Kristopher Krug of Digital Web has a fairly detailed interview with Mena Trott up today, covering a wide range of topics about Six Apart, TypePad and Movable Type. One of the best quotes is from Mena, talking about the staff here at Six Apart, "[T]here are so many smart people here who love what they’re doing and love blogging."

Though this interview was done a few weeks ago, today seems like a good day for it to be published, since it's somebody's birthday today.

Danny Sullivan, one of the biggest names in the search engine industry, has just announced the launch of the Search Engine Watch Blog, and takes the time to explain why he chose Movable Type 3.11 to power the blog. Danny got help setting up his blog from Rob Matthews of Tiger Technologies.

In passing, Danny points out some criticisms I'd made of the Search Engine Optimization industry, but to be clear, those are critiques of those who were or are abusing the medium. Here's hoping that Danny's example of how to use a blog well will be one that the unprofessional exceptions in the SEO business learn from and emulate.

Search Engine Watch has always had some of the best coverage of its industry, and now it's easier than ever to stay updated. If you want to find out more about the thinking behind the blog, you'll also want to check out the welcome message that explains a lot more background details.

It's not that new an issue, but this is a pretty good overview of the state of the battle against comment spam.

One of the key points that ought to be explored in future stories on comment spam is how much of comment spam is a problem with current versions of software, because it appears there's two key problems. There's fighting newer spam techniques with current versions of blog platforms (TypePad's made as much progress in this regard as Movable Type and TypeKey have), and there's the separate issue of getting people to update to current versions of software so that they'll be protected.

Greg Reinacker's asking whether negative associations with the "Gator" name justify changing his company's name. He wants feedback from the community, so give him your two cents' worth.

There's perhaps no other person more notorious for stirring debate amongst web design junkies, but the core points that Jakob Nielsen makes are almost always useful to refer to as general guidelines. Case in point: The Need for Web Design Standards, Jakob's latest Alertbox column, has some good guidelines to follow.

Though of course every design should conform to its audience's expectations and needs, the standards that have evolved in the weblog community are extraordinarily useful and usable. That might be part of the reason why, these days, some say that "Everything looks like a blog".

Know of a great weblog that deserves some recognition? Send in your suggestion for the Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards 2004. Though blog awards sometimes elicit divisive arguments in the blog community, there are undeniable promotional benefits to participating in many contests, so if you or one of your clients has a site worth checking out, go give it a plug.

A little bit more blogger triumphalism at CNET, where John Borland says Forget the political conventions in a story about the blogosphere's in-depth examination of the controversial National Guard documents that CBS News presented last week.

Though there are lots of intriguing details to the story, this particulra topic is probably polarizing enough that it's hard to point to this story as an example of the blogosphere's strength at finding information. If you're not talking to a business audience, or you can frame it in a context that focuses on the obscure information that's been dug up, this one might be worth referring back to.

Though these stories always focus on the fact that the raw number of paid bloggers is low, this one's worth reading to note that there actually are a number of people getting paid for the work they do on their blogs. Naturally, one of the easiest transitions bloggers can make to paying work is to become a professional writer, and a few people who've made that transition are interviewed here.

Elise Bauer's excellent site "Learning Movable Type" covers a perennial favorite topic: Keeping an Entry at the Top. Many people want to "pin" a post to the top of their blog, and there's some good suggestions on how to do so here.

Also worth noting is that Elise has a great new way of browsing the terrific collection of resources she's assembled. The new Table of Contents gives you easy access to one of the best third-party resources about Six Apart tools and platforms.

This is the first in a series of tutorials regarding the API for developing Movable Type plugins for the new PHP dynamic rendering engine.

This tutorial applies to the current release of MT, which is version 3.11. Subsequent 3.x releases should also be compatible (and releases beyond that, but I cannot say for sure).

Continue reading 'Dynamic Publishing: PHP Architecture Overview'...

This one's a handy reference: Dirify in PHP, courtesy of Adam Kalsey. If you've ever used the "dirify" attribute in a Movable Type template tag, this function performs the same text transformation, but in PHP.

It's somewhat underreported that in Movable Type 3.x, we're using cleaner URLs by default (in the format yyyy/mm/dd/dirified_post_title.html) but if you're migrating over a site from earlier versions of Movable Type, or just want to use compatible logic when creating your own PHP output, you'll definitely find Adam's code snippet handy.

An amazing Movable Type-powered weblog: The Life & Times of Michmac is documenting hurricane Ivan's impending landing in Jamaica. It's a first-hand report of a category 5 hurricane, well worth reading. Here's hoping everyone stays safe.

PayPal's Developer Network blog (did you know it was powered by TypePad?) is offering a sneak preview of a new look for the PayPal home page. It's a great use of a blog to give their biggest supporters some inside information. [Update: They've now added a link to the new design on their homepage, but it's still good that they let developers know on the blog first.]

If you're interested in building on top of their APIs or platform, you can take a look at the PayPal Developer Network homepage, which offers sample code and a variety of documentation.

Jon Armstrong's written up a good description of how he migrated his wife Heather's popular weblog Dooce to Movable Type 3.11 and made a lot of structural changes at the same time.

For those of you running advanced personal sites, it's a good reference.

A lot of new developments coming from La Jolla, where we are attending DEMOmobile and formally announced our collaboration with Nokia to make weblogging through mobile devices a much richer and easier experience.

We've released two press releases: One about the Nokia collaboration, the other about the new TypePad enhancements that were pushed out late last night.

Some may recall that we were at Demo 2004 earlier this year, showing off earlier moblogging features. The work done for that launch has been combined with the work we've done to enhance TypePad for moblogging and its capabilities to publish from Lifeblog and additional mobile clients.

If press releases aren't your cup of tea, you can read about the enhancements in our posting on Everything TypePad!

Related:

Christian Lindholm, Director of Multimedia Applications at Nokia Ventures Organization is a true believer in weblogging/moblogging and Nokia's LifeBlog and he practices what he preaches (and develops). Read his kind post about our collaboration on his own weblog.

Jim Louderback's eWeek piece on the new release

And for those who wondered why it took so long for us to post about this news -- we wanted to have a successful update of the new software before writing about the news.

We hope our TypePad users enjoy the new features.

eWeek's Jim Louderback just wrote up a good overview called Nokia and Six Apart Team on Mobile Blogging, which describes more of the work being done to connect Lifeblog and TypePad as well as a sneak preview of the bevy of new features in today's TypePad update.

...and be sure to check out the illustration in the story for a peek at Mena's private moblog.

The Crypt::DSA Perl module speeds up TypeKey signature processing, but it can be hard to install. If you're running Movable Type on Windows with ActivePerl 5.8, you can get it with ppm from a repository run by Randy Kobes at the University of Winnipeg. Type these commands at the command line:

ppm
rep add TheoryX http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/
search Math-Pari
install 2 (use the last number in the list, if it isn't 2)
search Crypt-Random
install 2 (use the last number in the list)
search Crypt-DSA
install 2 (use the last number in the list)
quit

Debian has a great packaging system, but it only has a C library for PARI, not the Math::Pari Perl module, and doesn't have a Crypt::DSA package at all. Feel free to TrackBack this post if you know an easy way to install Crypt::DSA in other environments.

This one's a bit technical, but if you make a client application that works with web services over HTTP, it could be indispensable: Mark Nottingham's work on an HTTP Header Registrie. An extensive list of HTTP headers are defined and documented, and it's hard to believe this is the first time they've all been listed in one place.

Following up on yesterday's feature ransoms post, the Guardian UK today offers Charity begins on the net, describing some of the stories around the TypeKey-enabled payment campaign service. We're seeing results already in our own community, as generous donors funded David Raynes' DropCash plugin just hours after he started his campaign.

Two new versions of one of the most popular posting clients for weblog authors were just released, and both these new versions of ecto continue their history of great support for both Movable Type and TypePad.

John Gruber, of Daring Fireball and award-winning Markdown plugin fame, has just released his MT Configuration Language Module for BBEdit 8. Mac users, give it a look: it makes editing your mt.cfg file a breeze.

Christian Lindholm of Nokia has described some of the personal connection behind our announcement of the collaboration between Nokia and Six Apart on connecting our Lifeblog and TypePad applications.

It's appropriate that it's such a human story, given that so much of what we're trying to do with moblogging is help people form and strengthen their connections to each other. Check it out, it's well worth the quick read.

Using Andre Torrez' cool (and TypeKey-enabled!) DropCash service, award-winning Movable Type plugin developers David Raynes and Chad Everett have started asking for donations to fund the further development of their plugins.

Chad's looking for support to help expand what Notifier can do, and David's looking to fund the creation of a plugin that works with... DropCash itself. Sounds cool!

Let us know if you're planning a similar campaign, or if you've had other successes in raising funds to support your plugin development. You don't have to be an award-winning plugin writer to make something cool and we're glad to see people getting a reward for the great work they put into expanding the Movable Type platform.

DMeurope has a story covering today's announcement of our collaboration with Nokia. In short, we're trying to make it easy for people to incorporate mixed media into their TypePad blogs, either from a mobile device or from a PC.

If you're attending, you can get a glimpse of the features of both this new update to TypePad and of Nokia's Lifeblog application at DEMOmobile, where there will be a full demonstration.

The University of Minnesota hosts an excellent collaborative resource called Into the Blogosphere, which presents a variety of perspectives on weblogs and blog communities. These tend to be slightliy more academic analyses of weblog culture, but they're great reading if you're looking for big-picture understanding of the medium.

If you're interested in the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) specification, you'll want to give the MTFriends plugin a try. It's a great first step, and using Movable Type 3's new plugin architecture, it should be possible to expand into a full management screen to update your XFN information from within Movable Type.

Evolt's Ten CSS tricks you may not know is exactly what the title suggests. Worth keeping around for future reference.

David Ely has a clever writeup about Setting up a Sideblog in TypePad shows you how to use advanced templates to include more than one of your TypePad blogs on a single page.

It's not for beginners, but if you're experienced with template tags and want to do something more complex with your TypePad site, it's a very clever solution.

TypePad subscriber Fraser Beach gets a nice feature (and photo!) in the Toronto Globe and Mail, discussing how he uses his weblog to communicate with his audience on the web:

"Most real estate sites tend to be a lot of hype," says company broker Fraser Beach. "This is an attempt to have an informed dialogue with our visitors. It allows us to have a different level and style of contact with our clients and potential clients."

That sort of informed dialogue is what the weblog medium does best, and you can take a look at Toronto At Home, Fraser's weblog, to see exactly how he makes use of TypePad to grow his business. And be sure to check out the Recently Sold photo album, displaying some of the homes that Fraser's sold in the past. It's a smart use of TypePad's photo album feature to show off the skills and experience that help keep a small business growing.

We've just released Movable Type 3.11, which fixes a few bugs that have popped up in certain configurations. It's a recommended update for all Movable Type users.

As Jeff Jarvis explains, Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott's new Movable Type weblog is something you'll either love or hate. But for those who read the magazine, it should act as a great example of a traditional journalist using the new medium well.

InternetWeek's got a short little story called Six Apart Releases Movable Type 3.1 that's got some good points but also says Six Apart has three employees. Actually, we have employees on three continents, so we're a little bigger than that, but that's a minor point. More importantly, we're still looking for good people to join us.

Chad Everett has updated his MT-Notifier Plugin for Movable Type to version 2.2.2. This excellent plugin lets you send email notifications to subscribed readers of a weblog when you update your site.

As one of the award-winning plugins from our contest, Notifier's got some great functionality. You'll want to grab the new version to make sure you get all the latest functionality.

Phil Windley has a simple writeup of How to Start a Blog that offers some great tips for beginners. Another one worth bookmarking.

Martin Roell's created a fantastic paper with the unweildy title of "Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers' Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing". Though the name makes it seem a bit dry or academic, there is some fantastic information here describing how blogs can help an organization or company communicate better internally.

Well worth a read, and either download the PDF or bookmark the page to send along to clients the next time you need to explain why they might want to use weblogs behind the firewall.

Need a simpler overview? Today's Mississippi Clarion Ledger has an entry-level look at businesses using blogs. It's a good, brief introduction for people who don't want as much detail.

Picostation's just released PicoBlogger, a blog client for Symbian Series 60 phones that lets you post to a Movable Type or TypePad blog via the Metaweblog API or Atom API.

Though you can post to TypePad from any mobile phone right now, a dedicated client offers the potential to smooth out the user experience and share your photos even more simply than many current phones allow. Cool stuff.

The folks at Vpop have made a special version of their UltraBar toolbar for TypePad users, the TypePad UltraBar for Firefox users. It adds some quick links to key TypePad features to your browser if you're using the (excellent) Firefox browser from Mozilla.

This TypePad toolbar runs on any platform that Firefox supports.

David Raynes' award-winning Movable Type plugin MultiBlog has been updated with some great fixes to version 1.1.

If you downloaded the version in the Contest Plugin Pack, you'll want to upgrade, and if you're looking for some inspiration on how to use the plugin, you can check out Arvind's merging your blogs post on Movalog.

For those of you who are interested in working with the BitTorrent protocol, you might want to check out Blog Torrent, an initiative to use blogging technology to simplify BitTorrent for average users.

Torrents are still fairly hard for regular people to use, so integrating with simple blog tools could definitely help increase adoption. They've got a sourceforge project up and running already, so go take a look.

Scott Hanson's made a tool to export from WordPress to Movable Type's import format. In addition to the code, there's some interesting conversation about more general import formats using more contemporary feeds and formats, but it seems like the simplest future path might just be using the Atom API to migrate posts directly between tools that support the format, once it's mature enough to represent an entire weblog's worth of data.

Apple's just launched an iTunes Affiliate Program which promises 5% commissions on revenue generated by your links to songs, albums, or artists on their music service.

Combined with their existing tools for generating RSS feeds or just using their raw XML, this seems like a ripe area for building a plugin to make iTunes affiliate integration easier.