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?

We have even seen these styles being ported to Blogger as well, which is not just a great endorsement of the quality of the designers' work, but also of the promise of a weblog HTML standard which serves to benefit our collective users more than anyone else -- and isn’t that what its all about?

So what has been happening on the Six Apart front since we announced the winners? Well a lot of energy as of late has been focused on bringing a vast majority of the styles to LiveJournal. To all of those people who grew frustrated in LiveJournal land by the TypePad and Movable Type bias, I cannot tell you how helpful and valuable all your feedback was during the process. It is because of you that we learned so much and as a result why LiveJournal will be the first of our hosted products to get these designs available to them at the click of a button. So to all of you LJers out there, stay tuned, and be patient, it won’t be long until you have over a hundred new styles and themes to choose from.

Now what about TypePad? TypePad will get them too. In fact TypePad is next. In the meantime Pro users can take advantage of Style Contest Styles immediately by using the Custom CSS feature. The only caveat is that you need to upload all of the style’s background images and other assets into your TypePad account. But that is pretty straightforward using TypePad’s File Manager.

Naturally, Movable Type users can use all of these styles right now using the Style Catcher plugin -- which, if you’re using Movable Type 3.3, you already have installed. Its actually kind of fun -- I wasted far too much of one of my work days installing 100 different styles to my blog.

And that about sums up Six Apart. What about the Arvind, Jesse and Elise (the organizers of the contest)?

They have been working on a new website called "The Style Archive" which will serve as a permanent repository and library for all the styles build to support the blog HTML standard. It will also be a repository for new styles that designers have been agitating to add. That means that The Style Contest’s website will be freed up for future contests!

So what are you waiting for? Go try out some of the new styles, and feel free to pass the link along to any of your friends whose blogs are looking a little long in the tooth.

By the way, if you are using a style from the contest, let us know by leaving a comment, and we might give you some link love!