Six Apart Update: June 2005

One of the great things about having had the LiveJournal team join us at the beginning of this year is that we've learned a lot of good ideas from them. Among the best, and simplest, is the monthly updates that the team posts to LiveJournal News. We've decided to steal share the idea, so here's a quick roundup of what we've been up to in the past month at Six Apart.

The TypePad team's been cooking, with the new earnings features having launched, offering you a chance to make some money with your TypePad blog. The first way to earn money is a simple system for adding text ads to your site, and more earnings features are on the way. Plus, the team has another collection of updates scheduled to become available tonight, featuring a number of new design tools and themes, powerful community management features, and a number of smaller improvements.

Movable Type users have a couple of recent highlights: The biggest news is the announcement of Movable Type 3.2, which is being accompanied by some posts highlighting our 32 favorite features in the new release. We launched version 3.17, which isn't a required update, but does fix some bugs that affected a small number of users, and published an article on our Professional Network about alternate application templates, which give you complete control over customizing Movable Type's interface.

The team also brought out one of the most-requested features for Movable Type, the Tags plugin. In addition to being a simple new feature that lets you easily describe your entries, the plugin is available as an open source Power Tool that you can customize and extend for your own applications or plugins.

Speaking of tags, the LiveJournal team launched their own tagging feature to a great response, with millions of tags already having been applied to entires. The sale on permanent accounts let a lot of people make their connection to the LiveJournal community, well, permanent, and LiveJournal also announced support for the OpenID identity system, which we'll be talking a lot more about in the future. (The LJ team will also have their own news update with more details for that community, so be sure to check that out.)

And while we're on the subject identity, we've just launched some long-overdue updates for TypeKey. The authentication service now has a better signup process, new longer-lasting cookies (so you don't have the annoyance of having to keep logging in) and a spiffy new logo.

TypeKey brings us back to where we started: TypePad's new features. Among the many additions coming for tomorrow is support for TypeKey authentication on TypePad blogs, and we're excited to see how the community takes advantage of the new design features.

And as always, we're looking for talented people to join our team, so check out our job listings and if you (or your friends) are a good fit, we'd love to hear from you.