Labs
The labs at Six Apart are constantly humming as we work on new ideas to make the Web richer and more rewarding. Here, we'll reveal a few of our favorite ideas that are still in development stage. Download them, play with them — and please, send us your input and feedback at any time.
Some Useful Links
Labs Blog
hCard Hacking in Perl
This morning one of our interns finished up one of his hackathon projects (every Wednesday is hack day -- our coders spend all day working on projects that they think are interesting, valuable, or just plain cool. And yes, we...
Facebook Connects with Movable Type
Blogging is evolving, to encompass the world of social networking and connect to the rest of the web, merging publishing with community. Movable Type users know this better than anyone, since they get first and best access to the coolest...
Bringing Great Blogging Tools to iPhone
Ever since Ben and Mena Trott created Movable Type together so that Mena could blog and build a community, Six Apart has been about helping to get more people blogging. In order to do this we must produce optimized user...
TypePad AntiSpam: What's Good for the Web
At Six Apart, our mission is to help people communicate on the web, and we've always done this by making the best software and services that we can. But part of our larger goal is to help do what's...
Bringing Blogging To Your Social Networks
First, we brought all your social networks to your blog with Action Streams. Today, we start to complete the circle. Ever stopped to think about how many places on the web you post about your life? For many of us,...
Yahoo! Fire Eagle for Movable Type
I've been interested in geo-location stuff for a long time now. Even back in 2003, when we launched TypePad, we built in support for parsing photo EXIF data to look for latitude and longitude embedded by a camera or mobile...
Teaching Bloggers To Fish
We take design incredibly seriously at Six Apart -- the challenge of understanding constraints and working within them to make something beautiful, the thrill of seeing a final product that "just works", and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that you...
MT in 2008: Open, Powerful and Easy
I started blogging on Movable Type in 2002 -- and began a long love affair with the product that has helped transform the world of blogging, and the world blogging touches. I remember that sense of both freedom and control...
The Social Graph API and Surprises
On Friday, Google released an interesting new API called the "Social Graph API" which can be used to connect accounts online. The API is a concrete step in opening the social graph, and it is great to see Google demonstrating...
Time for Action: What We’re Opening Next
A few months ago, we announced that we were opening the social graph and invited others to join us. An effort like that encompasses many different technology projects and all kinds of different companies; in just a few months...
Featured Projects
Movable Type Open Source
The Movable Type Open Source Project is a community effort, led by Six Apart, devoted to creating an open source version of the award winning, ground breaking and revolutionary blogging platform.
OpenID
OpenID was created at Six Apart and eliminates the need for multiple usernames across the web, simplifying your online experience. It has grown from its original grassroots community to be supported by some of the biggest sites on the net.
memcached
memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that is used all over the internet. It speeds up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in memory which reduces database load.
TypePad AntiSpam
TypePad AntiSpam was created to provide the blogosphere with a free, open source solution to fight comment spam. It fights spam for every TypePad blog and is used by some of the largest blogs online.
Additional Hip Projects
TrackBack
TrackBack was created at Six Apart in 2002 and provides a framework for peer-to-peer communication and notifications between web sites.
MogileFS
MogileFS is our open source distributed filesystem that enables horizontal scaling of storage across any number of cheap machines for high traffic applications.
Perlbal
Perlbal is our Perl-based reverse proxy load balancer and web server and it processes millions of requests a day on LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad and dozens of other Web 2.0 applications.
Gearman
Gearman is a system to farm out work to other machines, dispatching function calls to machines that are better suited to do work, to do work in parallel, to load balance lots of function calls, or to call functions between languages.
TheSchwartz
The Schwartz is a job queuing framework that developers and administrators can use to offload non-critical work to a background task manager.
DJabberd
DJabberd is a high-performance, scalable, extensible Jabber/XMPP server framework designed to be highly extensible, scalable, and high performance.
Data::ObjectDriver
A relational object driver that doesn't suck. Data::ObjectDiver is an extensible Perl module that abstracts developers away from the complexities of SQL, caching and partitioning - without requiring a million other perl modules.
Developer Resources
Six Apart Update Stream
The Update Stream provides a simple interface to subscribe to a persistent stream of entries made in the Six Apart universe.
Movable Type Developers
Are you a developer or designer who wants to learn how to build on top of Movable Type?
Movable Type Designers
Do you get excited when you find a new "template tag"? Learn everything you need to know about creating great themes and templates for Movable Type.
TypePad Developers
TypePad is a powerful, hosted blogging service that provides developers with a robust set of APIs to manage weblog content, as well as an easy-to-use widget API enabling third parties to easily insert content into sidebars.
TypePad Widgets
The Widget API is as simple and straightforward as they come, and the documentation is all online.
