Six Apart News & Events: March 2005

Upcoming.org is a popular web-based events-tracking service, and Andy Baio, the site's creator, has just announced a number of significant new features.

In addition to expanding the types of events that can be entered, Upcoming now supports tags, a powerful REST API, a better design, and reminders by email or SMS.

These new features make it a much more powerful platform, and it should be possible to do fairly straightforward integration with TypeLists or a weblog calendar with the new API. We'll keep our eyes open for creative uses that connect with weblog platforms.

InfoWorld has just published a review of Movable Type 3.15, with the ultimate conclusion that "Overall, Movable Type delivers a solid blogging experience." There's a useful overview of the platform's features, along with some legitimate points about what needs improvement, but we're just as glad to see users explaining why Movable Type is the right choice for them as well.

The Christian Science Monitor has a broad look at politicians using blogs to better communicate with their constituencies. Anything that improves transparency, increases accountability and encourages communication from elected officials can only be considered a good step.

Thanks to a heads-up from Brittney, we noticed a segment that WKRN TV in Nashville, Tennessee ran about the active and growing blogging community in their hometown this week.

As the video of the segment (Windows Media stream) shows, each local gathering of bloggers has its own personality and community.

Some of the bloggers covered include Paul Chenoweth's Movable Type-powered blog and Brittney's Sparkwood & 21, powered by TypePad.

The local news channel's savviness about blogging shouldn't come as a surprise; They have their own roundup of local blogs, including some efforts from their own on-air staff.

We love the creative ideas that come from the folks at Veer, not least because of their great Movable Type-powered blog The Skinny, but their latest project is another really great way to get your creative juices flowing.

Personality is a new set of evocative portraits created to represent a range of audiences. In the same way that use of personas or group personas can help refine the information architecture or interaction design of a project, these visual personas can help drive the aesthetic and artistic focus of a project.

We're lucky to have lots of Professional Network members who are freelancers, and for all of you who are out there fending for yourselves, you'll want to consider The Ten Commandments of Freelancing. Scott Thigpen's put together an outstanding list on his TypePad-powered blog that's worth bookmarking for future reference.

The fight against comment and TrackBack spam is an ongoing battle, and it's worth reviewing some of the new options available for managing the attacks.

Since our last roundup, which covered many mod_security options as well as the DSBL plugin, some popular new choices have come to the forefront.

Cameron Marlow of Blogdex fame has created MT-Keystrokes, a proof-of-work plugin that requires human input and a javascript interpreter in the commenter's browser.

If you're facing TrackBack attacks, you'll want to enable the DSBL plugin (as well as MT-Blacklist, if you don't already have it) and a nice complement to these functions is MT-Moderate, which enables moderation of TrackBacks. Jay's got some other techniques listed in his recent roundup as well, including ways to ban comments based on content, for filtering out comments that use numeric entities or comments that use ASCII characters.

As always, you should review our Guide to Combatting Comment Spam if you want to know more about the hows and whys of the battle against TrackBack and comment spam. Many of the pros and cons of these tactics are discussed there. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the battle against spammers, one must-read site is Ann Elisabeth's Spam Huntress, where she fights the good fight daily.

It's a great idea to have a written blog policy if your company allows blogs, and especially if your company encourages blogging. Feedster has just posted their corporate blogging policy and it looks like a fairly straightforward set of policies. Many of the issues covered here would be good to use as a base when creating your own organization's blogging policy.

If you're Perl-fluent amd looking for a cool little tool to work with XML data, check out the XSH command-line interface. As described in this DevX article:

Enter XSH, an open source command-line XML shell that lets you interactively query and manipulate XML data, simplifying development and testing of XML query and manipulation code. Since XSH is written in Perl, its syntax resembles Perl syntax, a boon if you are already familiar with Perl. XSH even lets you write Perl code and access XML data structures as if they were ordinary Perl variables. In addition to Perl, XSH gives you XSLT capabilities such as XPath querying, enabling you to quickly and succinctly express complex queries with the XPath language.

Thanks to the Amazon Web Services Blog for the link.

PBS Online recently implemented TrackBack support on almost every page on their site, and The Dead Parrot Society has a Q&A with the team responsible for the deployment.

One of the keys to implementing TrackBack is being able to work from the Standalone TrackBack implementation that was shipped along with TrackBack a few years ago. We've been glad to see a rise in interest around the code since it was included in the Power Tools that were launched last week.

Voting for the 2005 Photobloggies is open for five more days. Like all web awards, the Photobloggies are a reflection of their community and show the growing popularity and prominence of photo blogs. Be sure to check out the many excellent nominees.

Another entry in the growing number of topic-specific blogs is the new Purseuing. Dedicated to covering everything having to do with handbags, purses, and totes, it's a cleanly-designed new Movable Type-powered site that covers its niche well. Perfect for inspiration for blogging about your own fixations.

If you're in New York City, we'd love to have you swing by the Gothamist/Six Apart Happy Hour tomorrow night. We're co-hosting it with venerable New York blog Gothamist from 7 to 9pm at Sweet & Vicious.

Mena will be there, and since we had a great turn-out the last time we had a get-together in New York, we're hoping to have a full house again.

We've just released our collection of Power Tools, a broad range of open source components and modules that make it easy to get, manipuate, and manage web data. Many of these components are new, and can be combined together to build cool apps like the Friends Aggregation Page that Ben described at the Emerging Technology Conference.

Google's just launched Google Code, a repository for all of the open source code that they're contributing for you to make use of in your apps. Much of the code is (not surprisingly) oriented around building, testing, or debugging large-scale web apps, but it's well worth a look if you're hoping to expand your toolkit.

Brad's been active with a cool little LiveJournal hack, inspired by the buzz around tags at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, where he displays LiveJournal's interests in a new variable-sized tag-style display, instead of the years-old sorted list. Pretty.

Another cool little work-in-progress is the AJAX whiteboard Brad's put together. As Brad mentions, it only works in Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox, and it tends to die after a little while. But if you want to see why it's so cool, have someone else edit the drawing at the same time as you, and you can watch their updates in realtime.

A few of us from Six Apart are at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, as mentioned on our Six Apart news blog, and if you're here, you'll want to check out Ben Trott's session on Making Web Services Personal at 2:35pm.

One of the coolest things we've seen since getting here is the announcement from Amazon's A9 search team of the new OpenSearch spec.

While we'd hacked together a solution for enabling OpenSearch on your Movable Type site while we're here (and got to tell an old Etech friend about the implementation), Niall Kennedy was busy posting while we were still in the panels, so he has a straightforward implementation of an OpenSearch template for Movable Type.

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, our VP of Engineering, has also released an OpenSearch implementation for Bulkfeeds, allowing you to search the Japanese blogosphere. You can add the service on the add columns page.

One area that nearly everyone agrees that Microsoft excels in is the typefaces they distribute to web users. Poynter Online shows us the future of Microsoft's font collection with screenshots of the new family of fonts expected to be released with Microsoft's new products next year.

If you need a copy of the existing core web fonts that Microsoft has made available, you can get them from SourceForge, and if you're looking for other widely-distributable fonts to design for, you'll want to consider the Bitstream Vera family, which is made available under an open-source license.

Of course, you'll want to define a smart set of default values if your preferred fonts aren't available, but at least there's hope for improvements in typography for many users in the future.

Update: It's worth noting that the Atom 0.6 Draft should not be deployed, as noted in the spec itself. This format is only to be used for experimentation or testing.

Niall Kennedy has created an updated Atom feed based on the latest draft of the syndication format, as the IETF Atom group moves forwards towards finalizing the standard.

Even better, there's an updated template available if you'd like to implement the updated draft on your own site.

Spring has almost sprung and along with the warmer weather comes conference season. At Six Apart, we’re looking forward to coming out of hibernation and meeting with our customers, partners and friends face-to-face. Here’s a sample of where you can catch us live in the upcoming weeks.

Anil & Jay Wrapping up another great South by Southwest

This week Anil Dash and Jay Allen represented Six Apart at SXSW, where, we are happy to announce Movable Type received a 2005 Bloggie award for "Best Web Application for Weblogs." Congratulations to all the winners and to the show organizers for putting on another great conference.

Ben and Brad at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

Ben Trott and Brad Fitzpatrick are off to San Diego to mingle with the engineering crowd. Make sure to catch Ben's session on "Making Web Services Personal." Extensive sample open source code will be distributed at the session and is sure to satisfy our geek friends.

Mena at the 2005 Non Profit Technology Conference

This year's theme is "Innovation and Vision in Nonprofit Technology: The Next 10 Years". We are honored that nTen invited Mena to be one of two keynote speakers addressing the crowd (the other is Esther Dyson). If you are a non-profit or work with non-profits we highly recommend attending this outstanding conference.

Deborah at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Summit

For the non-geeks among us, WOMMA is hosting a first ever conference on word of mouth marketing for Senior Marketing execs. Deborah Schultz will be speaking on the unique aspects of using blogs to market products and develop customer loyalty. All friends of Six Apart get a $75 discount. Just use the discount code "welovesixapart" when you register.

So if you plan on attending any of these conferences, we hope you will stop by and say hi. We look forward to seeing you.

Now that they're up and running and have had time to talk to their audiences, we're proud to announce two of our newest partners on the TypePad platform.

First, in North America, popular social networking site Friendster has just launched Friendster Blogs, powered by TypePad. It's been great to see the team at Friendster appreciate the potential and power of weblogs for their community, and the response to the new service (especially its photo albums) has been outstanding.

And just this week in Germany, T-Online has launched T-Online Weblog. T-Online Weblog is available at the Basic and Plus service levels.

We're extremely excited about the potential of these promising new audiences getting started with TypePad and look forward to a new group of people discovering weblogging.

Brent and Sheila Simmons have created two of the most popular weblog client applications for the Mac, NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, and DrunkenBlog has just published an interview with the couple giving some insights into what it took to make the popular reading and writing tools.

One of the best quotes, from Brent:

Is RSS like email, Usenet, chat, a web page, iCal, or iTunes? It's like all of them and it's like none of them: it's its own thing. And each person uses it differently from other people. For me, that's the exciting thing about developing NetNewsWire.

Pardon the promotional interruption, but if you're reading the Professional Network website or feed and haven't had the time to sign up as a member, you've got a little extra incentive to join the Network today.

If you take a look at the latest members-only post, you'll find a list of ten new projects or jobs that are looking for a weblog professional to help out. We're going to be growing the number of project prospects and job leads that we pass on to Professional Network members, ranging from high-level strategy consulting to in-the-trenches hacking, and ProNet members will be the first to know when they arise.

Of course, there's a whole list of other benefits for joining as well, ranging from the active mailing list to a network member commercial license for Movable Type.

Over on lj_dev, the LiveJournal developer's community, Brad's put out a request for Windows FotoBilder clients. If you're interested in building clients that talk to FotoBilder services, such as ScrapBook, you'll want to start with the FotoBilder Protocol documentation.

CNET News.com has published a FAQ about Blogging on the job. While there's some of the usual hype about people getting fired for blogging, they do point out that their own research didn't show anyone in their sample who'd had to fire someone for blogging. There's also a mention that "corporate policies already address many issues related to blogs, such as protecting confidential information, upholding the company's reputation, and Internet use at work".

Some of the most interesting discussion in the piece has to do with the opportunity for blogging as part of one's job or to advance one's career. In all, it's a well-balanced resource worth saving for future reference.

Richard MacManus, who's been on a roll lately with his excellent blog, Read/Write Web, presents a look at a Collaborative Feedburner Stats Project. Richard's talked to the team behind the popular XML processing service and convinced them to make individual feed statistics available through a simple REST API.

Once you've got stats for your burned feed, you can parse the XHTML or XML and start to use the data in your applications or plugins. Richard is leading an effort to publish individual web stats in order to determine trends and collaboratively analyze the results.

With all the growing excitement around AJAX web development and the new toolkits becoming available, it's important to make sure this new breed of web applications is available for everyone who uses the web.

Some useful new references that can help your AJAX projects are AJAX and accessibility and Jeremy Keith's Progressive enhancement with AJAX, which makes an explicit connection between using AJAX technologies to improve a page's function and using progressive enhancement with semantic markup and CSS to improve a page's presentation.

If you've seen Nokia's LifeBlog application and have wanted to play with it on your own weblog to try out the media blogging features, you'll want to take a look at the new Lifeblog API implementation for Movable Type. (And the implementation notes.)

If you're looking for a list of all the services where Lifeblog works, you can review the list of Lifeblog-compatible services, which has grown to include the new Friendster Blogs service.

If you're looking for more documentation on the Lifeblog API, you can look back to the Professional Network post on the Atom Format Working Draft update, which includes links to Lifeblog API documentation.

mediabistro's FishBowlDC has just become the first weblog with a White House press pass. Despite the common tendency to see weblogs and journalism as being in contention, FishBowl's accreditation shows that the two media can complement each other quite well. FishBowlDC, like all of mediabistro's blogs, is powered by Movable Type.

The Los Angeles Times has run a brief look back at where Six Apart came from, including a bit of history about Ben and Mena Trott, as well as some hints as to what they see next for us and the blogging industry in general. If you're interested in some more background about the company, you'll want to give it a look.

Zoundry has just announced a new beta release of Blog Writer, their WYSIWYG posting editor for posting to weblogs on Windows machines. The new version features drag-and-drop editing, Firefox compatibility, and a product placement engine to insert affiliate links.

CNET News.com interviews Bradley Smith, one of the six commissioners of the United States Federal Election Comission. Though there's few specifics, the conversation covers the idea that the FEC might be considering the impact that weblogs have on elections, and may seek to place them under the regulations of the Commission.

There's the usual debates by people for and against the idea, but what's more of a milestone is the fact that Federal regulators are looking at the weblog medium at all. Technology can sometimes take a long time to enter the political realm, and it's remarkable that weblogs have reached such a point so quickly.

For the second year in a row, popular weblog advertising system Blogads is offering a reader demographics survey. Though the survey sample isn't necessarily wide enough to be a true representation of who's reading weblogs, it's still a useful tool for advertisers and site owners who want to know a little bit more about their audiences.

Sometimes development trends are worth the hype. If you've been itching to play around with the AJAX approach to web applications, you'll want to grab the SAJAX Toolkit. It's PHP-only for right now, but it gives you a robust set of tools for getting started with much richer web applications. SAJAX is BSD licensed, making it fair game for your apps even if you want to charge for them, and there's a donation link so you can support its further development.

If you do dig into AJAX functionality, be sure to check out these XMLHttpRequest usability guidelines for some best practices on how to make sure your gee-whiz features meet your users' expectations.

PoeticForm is a small and amusing plugin that lets your format your text as a poem, automatically adding markup to your text so that your poetry gets an appropriately elegant presentation. Go give it a look.

If you're interested in seeing how much outbound traffic your links drive, you can try out the new MyBlogLog service. It's a simple javascript include that will let you track how many people click through on links in your posts. There's a free version as well as a paid service with realtime and historical stats.

On Monday we told you about the launch of TypePad UK and now we're glad to let you know that TypePad Finland has launched. If you've been waiting for Finnish localization, your waiting is finished.

Billboard magazine's got a new TypePad-powered blog on the economics of digital music called Post Play. It's the best medium for tracking a market that's moving so quickly, and the presentation is excellent, having been created in partnership with Rafat Ali's paidContent.org.

There are some executives who will consider the Wall Street Journal the most authoritative source on strategic decisions, and if you're pitching to a client (or your boss) who fits that profile, you should hang on to "Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back" from yesterday's issue.

In the article, GreenCine's Movable Type-powered weblog, GreenCine Daily, which we've mentioned in the past on the Professional Network post on Blogs on Film, is specifically credited with a 20-fold rise in hits on the GreenCine website.

Also mentioned is the Stonyfield Farm stable of weblogs, also powered by Movable Type, as described in this case study.

AIGA (the American Insitute of Graphic Arts) has a compelling interview with Todd Dominey on their Los Angeles chapter's blog today. Known in the blogging and design communities for his popular blog What Do I Know, Todd's got some great insights into the process and thinking behind his work, in offline media, online with Flash, and on his blog using Movable Type. There's also some interesting discussion of his new SlideShowPro slideshow component.

John Gruber's got a great plugin that's sure to be loved by all of us who are meticulous about our site layouts: Kill 'nav-commenters.gif'.

John's plugin undoes Movable Type's habit of writing a commenter icon .gif to your weblog's root directory. If you've been bugged by the little guy with the talking bubble since version 3.0 came out, now you can have some relief.

Via Jeremy Zawodny comes word of an extensive new set of Yahoo web services offerings. Starting with an announcement on the Yahoo Search Blog, Yahoo links to their new developer network, their Movable Type-powered web services weblog, and a great overview from Paul Bausch on the O'Reilly Network, giving a preview of his upcoming Yahoo! Hacks.

The wide range of services seem like they'd make a great base of plugins for Movable Type users, and we're excited to see what creative works come out of this new set of tools.