Getting Started
Once you've joined the Six Apart Affiliate Program and start earning money for referring users to our platforms, you'll want to build your service right into our blogging tools. Let’s take a look at some specific examples of what’s available using our platforms.
- Create a TypePad Widget
- Coming Soon: Create a LiveJournal Widget
- Support posting via the Atom API to a blog
- Support the Open Media Profile for Vox integration
- Publish your output as an Atom feed
- Show status or updates with a badge
- Offer a Movable Type plugin
- Work with the common blog XHTML
- Support OpenID for Identity
Create a TypePad Widget.
The TypePad Widget API provides one of the quickest and easiest ways to integrate your product into any Six Apart product. Using a simple HTML form you include on your site virtually anyone can provide a mechanism to their users allowing them to quickly and easily publish a custom widget to their TypePad weblog. Join the TypePad Widget Developer Program, develop a widget and get your widget listed in our TypePad Widget Gallery today!
» TypePad Widget Gallery
» TypePad Widget Technical Documentation
Create a LiveJournal Widget.
The LiveJournal Widget API, coming soon, offers much of the same integration as TypePad's Widget API, but gives you access to the millions of users in the LiveJournal community. And just as TypePad offers its Widget Gallery, we'll be promoting LiveJournal widgets to our entire community to make it easier to discover your work.
Support posting via an API to a blog.
This is an important requirement if you have an application that produces output or if you have content that you’d like to make appear on people’s blogs. Our Atom and XML-RPC APIs give you a programming interface to post to over 10 million blogs powered by Movable Type, TypePad, Vox and LiveJournal. We’ve created documentation for our Atom API and XML-RPC APIs to show you what your program needs to do, and a smart way to take advantage of this functionality is by having the final step where a user saves or shares their work just prompt whether they’d like to send their work to their blog as well. Once you support posting to a blog, make sure to append a “Powered by” or “Posted from” link to the bottom of the entry, to help promote your service.
» Six Apart Atom Resource Center
» XML-RPC Documentation Index
» More about the Atom Publishing Protocol
Support the Open Media Profile for Vox integration
The Open Media Profile for Open Search is a simple, powerful way to have your application or content be available to Vox users around the world, from right within the service. It's a combination of the OpenSearch specification (spearheaded by Amazon's A9 team) and the Media RSS extensions created by Yahoo. Using these two open technologies, you can present video, photos, audio clips, or more as native assets in Vox. Check out the Full documentation for more information
» Open media Profile for OpenSearch
» OpenSearch 1.1 specification
» Media RSS Specification
Publish your output as a feed.
TypePad offers an easy feature for syndicating web feeds on a user’s blog sidebar. LiveJournal lets subscribers syndicate a feed into their Friends page for simple reading. And numerous Movable Type plugins such as Feeds.App allow the flexible display of information from web feeds in a blog. If you have a stream of updates, making it available as a feed means that it’s easy for anyone to redisplay the content on their blog where others can discover it.
» What is a feed?
» Six Apart Atom Resource Center
Show status or updates with a badge.
Most bloggers like to show their affinity for a cause, product, or idea by putting badges, graphics, or links on their blogs or journals. At its simplest, these can simply be images that a blogger can upload to their site to promote your product. One step up from this is to give HTML markup that the blogger can copy and paste into their posting interface to create a blog post about your service. But the most elegant and powerful method is to use TypePad Widgets, which provides a simple interface for third parties to insert arbitrary HTML onto a TypePad blog sidebar. All you need to do is define the HTML you want to add to the user's sidebar, and post that content to TypePad - we do the rest of the work for you.
» Browse the TypePad Widget Directory
» TypePad Widget API
» Movable Type Widget Manager
Offer a Movable Type plugin.
Movable Type is powerful enough to publish many of the most popular blogs in the world, including those by Fortune 50 companies. But the true power of the platform is its plugin architecture, which lets you deeply integrate your application’s features, data, and functionality into the Movable Type interface. In addition to the help we’ll provide in promoting your plugin to our community, we can provide resources and references on developers who can help create the plugin, and introductions to opportunities such as our hosting partners who can talk about pre-installing your plugin for their users.
» Movable Type Developer Center
» Movable Plugin Developers Guide
» Movable Plugin Best Practices
Work with the common blog XHTML.
All of our platforms support a common XHTML and CSS structure for their default output. If your application needs to parse XHTML, add behaviors to a web page, or understand the semantics of a blog’s markup, this is the largest single base of consistent pages available. And if you want to help users customize their designs or integrate with other platforms, supporting our common styles lets you reach paying customers around the world.
» Six Apart Design Center
» Browse some designs created by our community
Support OpenID for Identity.
We’ve created OpenID as a completely free and open format, based on the idea that bloggers see their blog’s address as their identity. In addition to an open specification, we’ve published or supported free open source OpenID code implementations in a number of popular programming languages. Less than two years since its creation, there are already almost 100 million OpenID-enabled web addresses on the web, so you don’t have to create your own authentication system just to have people sign in to your application. And if your users don’t have an OpenID identity already, our TypeKey, LiveJournal, and Vox services provide OpenID identities for free. And all of these services have the added benefit of requiring a verified email address. You don’t need to build Yet Another Identity Service.
» TypeKey Homepage
» Learn more about OpenID
» See an OpenID demo
