Style Contest Designer Interview Series
This post is the first in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Caroline Cano Morant, whose Make My Way theme won in the Technology category.
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Fast Search Plugin - Faster Searching for Movable Type
One of the great benefits of the Movable Type developer community is the commitment its own ProNet members have to improving Movable Type not just for themselves, but for all MT users. Their contributions are what make Movable Type so great. No better example exists then that of Mark Carey, who recently built a plugin that improves the performance of searching against a MySQL database in Movable Type. We asked if he wouldn't mind writing an article for us that explain how this plugin works. What follows is a description of Fast Search in Mark's own words.
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Talking At Ted
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted on Mena’s Corner. Funnily enough, it’s not that I haven’t had time to blog, it’s because I’ve been doing a whole lot of personal blogging over on Vox, some product blogging over at Team Vox and been totally heads-down in product development. Even with the Mena’s Corner absence, Six Apart is still well-represented with blogging, between Pronet Weblog, Everything TypePad and another blog you may have never seen before: TypePad Feature Weblogs (these are but a few). There are so many amazing blogs being featured each and every day — it’s quite remarkable to see the talent we have on the service.
I did want to write and check in and say that more of my blogging can be found at Team Vox and blogging almost daily (mostly privately) at mena.vox.com. If you’re unfamiliar with Vox, I wrote a post about it in early June. If you’d like an invite, simply request one.
A lot of what I wrote about in that introductory post about Vox, I also shared in my Ted talk in February. This summer, and for the first time, the Ted Blog has been putting up past talks online as a way to share the event with those who can’t attend. (See all the TedTalks online)
Yesterday my talk was added — and If you can bear to watch 18 minutes of me, I think it’s a good way to get an idea of the motivations behind Vox. I don’t talk about the product at all. Instead, it’s about how powerful personal blogging can be, as a way to stay connected and, fundamentally, record one’s life.
The Voice of ProNet
While this blog serves as the public voice of ProNet, I felt it was also important for the ProNet community to have a private voice as well - a place where ProNet members could converse more privately about their lives. Why? Because we are not just a collective of blogging professionals, we are people, and increasingly, we are friends.
And that is precisely why we created pronet.vox.com - a place for us to share with one another with the peace of mind that only our friends will be able to see the photos of our children, the videos from our latest family vacation and read our more personal thoughts.
So if you have a Vox blog and are a member of ProNet then join the ProNet neighborhood by leaving a comment here with the URL to your Vox blog. If you don't have a Vox blog, then sign up for an invite now and we will get you on board just as soon as we can.
Showing up in style
Just the other day I was surfing around and I stumbled upon a blog that was using a very familiar design. Hmmmm, now where have I seen that style before?
Oh yeah, it was created by one of the contestants from The Style Contest!
And just like that my day became a good one. I didn’t expect to feel so much pride in what we were able to accomplish with the contest. And where I once referred to only a hand full of people when I said "we," I can now safely refer to at least 70 people, from contest organizers, to designers, to all the people using those styles on their blog. And do you know what else is so encouraging? Getting emails from people wishing to submit more designs to the web site even after the contest is over. What better indicator is there to demonstrate our success then the community's continued interest in contributing styles just for the sake of the greater good?
Digging up info on Gopher
Thanks to Jason Kottke’s recent blog post about Gopher, people are discovering or rediscovering Gopher. Gopher is a text-based system for navigating documents on the Internet that was extremely popular in the early 90s and helped create and influence a lot of the content and culture that’s now shared via the World Wide Web. Today, we follow links to sites with http:// at the beginning of them, but in 1992, it was much more common to follow a gopher:// link, which still works in browsers like Firefox today.
One of the great things about working with Six Apart is that we don’t just get to work with people who know technology really well, sometimes we get to work with the people who invented them. One of the best examples is Paul Lindner, who’s been with Six Apart for years, working on infrastructure for our blogging services. Paul was one of Gopher’s creators, and we thought with the resurgence of interest that it’d be a nice chance to ask Paul a few questions.
First, short and sweet, how would you describe what Gopher is? How does it work?
Imagine a dead simple browsing experience optimized for hierarchical menus and documents. Think old-school AOL, think about your favorite dialup BBS, or your WAP-enabled phone. You look at a menu, select or search, get another menu or a document, repeat.
