Six Apart News & Events: November 2004

Merriam-Webster has named its top 10 words of the year, and blog is number one, with tens of thousands of lookups on its site every month. By this time next year, should we expect it to drop off the list of most-looked-up words since most people on the Internet will know what a blog is?

A good interview with Nick Bradbury of TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, with tips on becoming an independent software vendor:

If you plan to do this for a living, focus on building tools that make people’s lives easier or more interesting, and chances are you’ll last longer and find your work more fulfilling.

Rogers Cadenhead talks a bit more about the newly-released Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, and is very generously giving away five author's copies to people who comment on, or link to, his post about the book. It's one of the best references ever written on Movable Type, weighs in at over 400 pages, and covers the software all the way up to version 3.1. You'll definitely want to take a look.

There's even a link to a free chapter of the book on the publisher's site, if you'd like to get a look behind the covers before you get your copy.

If you're looking to share the joy of blogging this holiday season, you'll want to keep an eye on the TypePad gift offer we'll be making available next week. In addition to discounts that let you save up to 55% off a yearly subscription, you can get a free annual subscription to give as a gift when you renew your annual TypePad subscription.

Find out the details in the post on Everything TypePad, and check back in next week to sign up.

Blog Torrent is a simple, PHP-based application that makes it easier to share files on your blog using the bittorrent protocol. Right now there's a core of very useful functionality, but it seems like a wrapper to make this appear as a plugin within Movable Type would make for an even better experience.

As it stands, this is a big step forward for making the process of distributing files bittorrent as simple as it ought to be.

Movable Type's built-in MTCategoryCount template tag doesn't include posts that are in child categories in its count. So Chad Everett made a simple and useful plugin to include subcategory counts in your templates. Perfect.

Eyebeam research's fantastic tool reBlog has just released version 1.0. It's a combination of a Movable Type-compatible plugin with a full XML aggregation application that you can host on your own website.

You can use the reFeed component by itself just to browse feeds, or you can check out the Movable Type integration to choose which feeds and posts can flow into your own blog.

In all, it's a very impressive system for managing information flow, and would be a great fit, for example, for corporate bloggers who want to share news stories and feeds with their coworkers as they happen. Congratulations to the reBlog team on the launch of their new application.

There's a whole range of new ways to work with and manage your photos in Movable Type. First, if you're using Flickr to manage your photos, MovableTypeFlickrPhotosets will let you fetch a list of your Flickr photosets to include in your weblog.

To work with photos within Movable Type, you'll want to try MT-PhotoGallery. There's a straightforward set of instructions on the plugin page for integrating the system with your existing Movable Type installation.

If you'd rather work more with Movable Type's built-in functionality, you can follow either of two excellent tutorials from Nicholas Findley and Elise Bauer. There's also a list of photoblog tutorials on the Movable Type wiki which can work as a good starting point for more advanced exploration.

After your photos are online, you might want to let people annotate them in addition to leaving standard weblog comments on your posts. Fotonotes offers a good, open way to annotate JPEG images, and there's starting to be sample code and applications for allowing annotations that's being developed in the weblog community. This seems like a ripe area for connecting web services, so that a blogger could use TypeKey authentication to choose who is permitted to add notes to a photo.

Finally, once you've got the technology worked out, you might be looking for some inspiration. In that case, your best bet is Photoblogs.org. There's over 6000 photo blogs listed, with many of them powered by Movable Type or TypePad.

Andre Torrez, developer of the super cool service DropCash, has launched Everything TypeKey. It's a new wiki that lists all of the sample code, classes, scripts, tutorials, and applications that have been developed around our TypeKey authentication service.

There's some invaluable resources on the list, including Tim Appnel's TinyOrwell system, which lets you run your own local authentication, as well as TypeKey client sample code in PHP, Perl, and ASP.Net.

We've been very excited to see all the creative ways TypeKey has been used since its launch, and Everything TypeKey should be a good resource to make it easier to build on the platform in the future. If you've got something cool, just add it to the site, and if you want to talk to other developers working with TypeKey or be the first to know about new developments with the service, you can join the Six Apart Professional Network.

A new blog called ProHipHop is the first blog to cover the hip hop industry from a business perspective. Powered by TypePad, the new site lets publisher Clyde Smith share "hip hop-related business news from such industries and subsectors as music, movies, apparel, mobile content, automotive, publishing, jewelry and beverages".

Publisher Tim O'Reilly's company is a big believer in blogs, and it shows in Tim granting an interview to blogger Richard McManus on his Movable Type-powered blog, Read/Write Web. There's a lot of good discussion about web publishing, syndication, and business models, giving a good view of Tim's vision of where the web is headed.

PubSub, the search notification service has relaunched their site with a host of new features. It's simpler than ever to subscribe to a feed of results for a keyword search, you can find blog matches easily from their database of over 6.4 million weblogs, and there's downloadable sidebars available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

In all, it looks like a great leap forward for the platform.

Technorati's begun reaching out to their developer community with their new Developer Program, which includes a new mailing list, a developer's wiki, and a contest offering prizes ranging up to $2500 at the Apple Store. Membership in the program is free.

Feedster's newly launched developer contest is giving away iPods to developers who do creative things with with the service's APIs. Seems like a great prize for taking a look at their APIs.

24in48 is Lia Bulaong's thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Combining Movable Type, Flickr, and some smart bits of community connection, the project lets a disparate group of people all over New York City contribute to creating one collective and expressive whole.

More updates on TypePad today, including new photo album templates and fixes to the spell checker.

SBC's got a new promotion around a project called Project D.U. (short for Digital Universe) and they're promoting their internet service using weblog content as the bait to entice young users onto the web more frequently.

The project includes a syndication client that's pre-set with popular feeds from a variety of blogs, making it clear that SBC sees regular blog-reading as a good way to get subscribers to make regular use of the service.

Speaking of pop culture, Ask Metafilter has a thread on the best pop culture blogs. Well worth a look if you want to keep track of the latest in music, movies, TV, or celebrities.

AdWeek magazine, which has long been one of the standard-bearing trade magazines for the advertising industry, has just launched their new TypePad-powered blog AdFreak. Looks like they're naturals to the form, with the new site being full of attitude and intelligence even in its first few posts.

Thanks to Rick Bruner at BusinessBlogConsulting for the link.

Michael Gartenberg's covered another pop culture milestone for weblogs: Blogs were featured last night in the story line of one of the most popular dramas on television, The West Wing. For a more amusing read of the same event, you can always rely on Wonkette.

Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, has a very insightful post about why weblog editing is complex. Separate from issues of specific APIs, there's a lot of complexity in making publishing clients that can handle the features of different weblog platforms.

We've put some thought into into making weblog client development as straightforward as possible, and to that end, both Movable Type and TypePad use identical APIs and templates, with the only differences being where one platform supports features that the other does not.

For example, using TypePad's Atom API support to publish from a client should be a nearly identical experience to Movable Type's Atom API implementation. If you're developing weblog clients and facing the same issue, get in touch or TrackBack this post with your feedback.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research has a good Computerworld essay entitled Business Weblogs Are Double-Edged listing some sensible considerations to keep in mind when rolling out blogs. Michael knows of what he speaks: He's been maintaining his Movable Type-powered weblog for years.

CBS MarketWatch's Frank Barnako talks to our own Mena Trott about moblogging and the future of blogs and there's some interesting background on the growth of the entire blogging industry.

Joe Wiesman has a wistful look back at this year's professional baseball season from the perspective of the many bloggers who covered it. Including coverage of great sites like Baseball Musings and All-Baseball, it's a nice look at one of blogging's most active and passionate communities.

Two little plugins that have just popped up for Movable Type users who love books: Tony Bowden's MT Amazon Reading List and Byrne Reese's BookQueueToo. There's even a screenshot of the cool little interface that Byrne's put together for BookQueueToo. Well worth checking out, especially if you're one of the Movable Type users who's coveted TypePad's Reading TypeList feature.

Some of the best blogs act as creative outlets for documenting every day parts of life. The Chicago Tribune covers Kevin O'Neil's adventures on Chicago mass transit, which he documents for the world on his TypePad site, CTA Tattler.

Of course, exposing personal thoughts and personal life entails a certain amount of risk, as the piece in yesterday's New York Times entitled Traveling the Too-Much-Information Highway explores in detail. Heather Hunter details the negative effect that weblog transparency had on her dating career. For more background, click through from Heather's site and read the blogs of all the people involved in the story.

Last week's Online News Association conference in Hollywood wrapped up, and there's good coverage on the ONA conference blog, as well as a Associated Press writeup which summarizes most of the highlights. Also worth checking out is PaidContent.org's coverage, with many quotes from the event.

A clever new plugin, MTWeather lets you display the current weather dynamically on your Movable Type blog, using the Smarty-based dynamic template engine introduced in Movable Type 3.1.

It seems like some of the beautiful weather displays that have been created for news sites could be implemented with creative use of this plugin. Anyone up to the challenge?

Liz Lawley talks about the new site license for Movable Type at the Rochester Institute of Technology. We've created a number of educational licensing options just for these situations, and we're eager to see the creative ways that students and faculty at RIT make use of weblogs.

The latest attempt to create a micropublishing empire using Movable Type is Minkmedia, the product of Azeem Azhar and Shehnaz Suterwalla. Launching two new titles today, Honourable Fiend and Wanda Lust, the new publishing venture is aimed primarily at the EU market.

CBS MarketWatch has just reported that Military Advantage has just purchased DefenseTech.org, the popular Movable Type-powered weblog written by Noah Schachtman. It's another interesting milestone marking the importance of topic-specific blogs for publishers who cover narrow niches.

Military.com is owned by Monster, which has already shown its blog-savviness with the Monster Blog, their TypePad site aimed at job hunters.

In the move to standards-based design and CSS for layout, some may have forgotten how to use tables properly to present data. And some of the finer points of making tables accessible might have eluded you entirely. If so, you should check out Bring on the tables, Roger Johansson's excellent overview of the topic.

Today's Scripps Howard story on baby blogs is a terrific look at the weblogs that creative parents are creating for their young ones. Some of the best examples: Mothering Down the Bones and Chookooloonks, , both on TypePad, and A Peanut Called Zed, Dooce and the technically-impressive Trixie Update, all powered by Movable Type.

What these parents have done isn't just idle geekery, it also helps family and friends keep track of the little ones right from their web browser. Very cool!

We just got copies of Wiley::Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition, the new book on Movable Type from Rogers Cadenhead. It looks to be one of the best books on Movable Type that's been published, including coverage of the application all the way up to version 3.1 and even includes dedicated chapters on creating and using plugins, managing syndication files, and working with the weblog APIs supported by the application.

Congratulations to Rogers on the launch of his book, and be sure to check out the excerpts on the publisher's website.

Note: This tutorial was first published on October 29th for members of the Professional Network. If you'd like to get access to the benefits of membership in the network, sign up now.

Our last tutorial covering dynamic publishing provided a high-level technical overview of its implementation. In this tutorial, we will examine the way you create plugins for the PHP dynamic publishing model. It varies a bit from the Perl model, since we have built the template processing on top of Smarty, a popular and powerful templating engine for PHP.

Continue reading 'PHP Dynamic Publishing: Developing Plugins'...

We've just announced our partnership with Kanoodle which will let TypePad customers easily add contextual ads to their weblogs if they choose.

We plan to enable this feature on our Typepad service early next year, and we'e very excited to give TypePad weblogs the chance to easily generate revenue. Stay tuned as we'll be giving Professional Network members first notice on new ways to make money with your sites.

The Twin Cities' City Pages has always been a very blog-friendly publication, and now they've got an Interview with Chuck Olsen about his Blogumentary documentary about weblogs, which premieres tonight.

A beautiful example of a community that's just starting to embrace blogging, Hewn and Hammered is, according to the site's creators, "dedicated to any and all aspects of Craftsman, Mission, Prairie and related architectural and design styles."

It's well worth a look, and makes good use of TypePad's features, ranging from Reading TypeLists to Photo Albums to domain mapping the site to hewnandhammered.com.

Arvind has a great new tutorial on Skinning Movable Type up on Movalog. Though lots of people have worked to make the output templates in Movable Type skinnable with different CSS files, this is one of the first hacks to let you change how the application's UI appears.

And if you just want to focus on changing styles for the output from your weblog, you'll want to bookmark MovableStyle, which relaunched last month with a great new look and some cool new features.

Two of the most-requested features for TypePad users have just been added: rich text (WYSIWYG) editing and spell checking. It's easier than ever to post with the new formatting tools, so if you're recommending TypePad to your friends, they can now color and style their fonts easily. Be sure to check out the list of little refinements that make the new editor really shine.

And since a lot of ProNet members like to set up TypePad sites for their clients, friends, or family to use, and you'll be glad to know that you can still post in raw HTML if you want. Plus, you can use the newly beefed-up file manager to manage all the files on your TypePad account, including HTML and CSS files.

A number of excellent resources that can help you create a business blogging strategy have been published in the past few days. First, Computerworld has a number of stories describing some of the benefits, opportunities, and risks of corporate blogging.

And the team at CorporateBlogging.Info has made a Beginner's Guide to Corporate Blogging, a 16 page PDF document. A good complement to this offering is Writing for the Web, a six-page PDF document from BusinessLogs which covers the content side of business blogging.

Finally, there's a number of good events coming up for those interested in business blogging. This weekend is BloggerCon in California, and coming in January in Seattle is the Blog Business Summit. Both seem to be worthwhile events if you're either just getting started blogging within your organization or if you're looking to refine your use of weblogs.

Here in the United States, it's election day and the main act is one of the closest Presidential contests in American history. More than ever before, blogs are a central part of the story in this year's election, so here's some key links to watch today as the results come in.

First, the New York Times offers the opinions of a number of prominent political bloggers, each giving their own spin regardnig what the most important event in this year's campaigns has been. As CNET News.com noted yesterday, blogs are playing a critical role in the political campaigns of both the major parties.

If you'd like to track the results as they come in, Cynthia Webb at the Washington Post offers tips on creating your own newsroom, with the best summary of overall results coming from CNN's Election Results roundup.

The immediacy of publishing on the web leads some to suggest that bloggers will call the election before the traditional media does, based on their access to exit poll data, and possibly even affecting the election's outcome. Even companies like Edison Research, which helps conduct the exit polls for major media organizations such as the broadcast networks have their own weblogs, letting you see follow the story from the side of the information providers as well.

Of course, if you're a U.S. citizen, before you follow all the coverage and conversation about blogging the election, you should be sure and vote yourself. Hopefully a clear and uncontested winner will emerge tonight, but if there are any issues with the process of voting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Deep Links weblog should have good information.

General Motors has just started the GM Smallblock Engine Blog, and they're asking for stories for memories from their readers. A great start to a blog from one of the biggest companies in the world.

(Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.)

The Washington Post has announced the winners of its best political blogs contest, with a wide variety of Movable Type and TypePad powered sites making a showing congratulations to all of the winners.

Tom Coates has an interesting look at his posting patterns over the last five years that he's been maintaining his weblog. One of the best ways we can try to understand the trends in blogging over time is to look at the patterns that emerge over years of posting, and Tom's data is a good start.

Deutsche Welle’s 2004 Best of the Blogs Awards has just entered its final round. Sponsored by our European TypePad team, the BOB awards are getting down to the wire, with more than 100 blogs in eleven categories being up for judging starting Monday. Having been narrowed down from over 1000 suggestions, the blogs in the final competition have already shown themselves to be exceptional, and we'll get to find out which ones are most exceptional with everyone on the web being able to vote until December 5. Good luck to all the contestants!

David Michael Allen has posted a very elegant redesign of the Movable Type posting interface, complete with screenshots. Movable Type's interface is managed entirely with CSS since version 3.0, so it's easy to make customizations like these, or to even choose to show and hide entire facets of the interface, just by modifying the CSS included with the application.