SixApart is a leading company in the field of social graph experimentation and the most outspoken participating company willing to be critical of some of Google's efforts like OpenSocial. BlogIt is interesting beyond its basic functionality because it can tie together confirmed accounts on Facebook, outside blogs and Twitter - then place that information in the hands of a company dedicating significant time and resources to leveraging such information in the interests of users. BlogIt may be just a beachhead landed in the hostile territory not of Facebook, but of online identity chaos in general.
There's a very small club of people who've been blogging for ten
years; We talked to a number of these experts last year to celebrate
Dave Winer's 10th anniversary as a blogger, with more posts discussing Leslie Harpold, Michael Sippey and Harold Check. Today, another respected member of the blogging community joins that esteemed club, and we're thrilled to congratulate Jason Kottke on ten years of blogging.
Jason's
work on the design of his blog has obviously been a huge influence on
the design and voice of blogs overall. But that influence extends well
past the simple visual design of blogs; Some fundamental parts of the
structure of blogs that we now take for granted were innovations that
Jason helped dream up and popularize. When we spoke to Paul Bausch
five years ago about the creation of permalinks, one of the great
things to come out of that conversation was the quiet influence Jason
had in simply attaching anchors to each of his thoughts.As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.
The truth is, there are lots of good blogging tools out there, and they're all good at different things. But since upgrading from older versions to WP 2.5 can mean changes to your themes, plugins ("print your plugins list"!), and site, we thought we'd take a minute to explain why it may make sense to make those changes in Movable Type instead. For those people in the blogging community who've never taken a look, or who haven't seen MT in a while, you might just find some surprises.
Get Better Tech First
If you're into the technology of blogging, you've probably been hearing about technologies like Atom and OpenID for a while, and paying attention to newer innovations from Action Streams to iPhone interfaces to OAuth. But for things like Atom and OpenID, WordPress users have had to wait months or even years to get capabilities that Movable Type has pioneered. If you want OpenID commenting support on your blog today, Movable Type has had it built right in since the initial launch of MT4 last year -- we got a little bit of a head start there because Six Apart is where OpenID was invented. And we're not resting on our laurels; support for the newly-updated OpenID 2.0 specification is coming to MT shortly as well. Powerful new web services connected by OAuth are also right around the corner, letting you to keep control of your password without having to share it all around the web just because you want to try out a new web service on your blog.
This kind of stuff isn't new for us: Movable Type was the first an early blogging platform to support plugins at all. [Update: As always, we should have assumed Dave Winer got there first -- Manila had plugins much earlier.] MT was the first to have support for Creative Commons built right in. And it's not just that we participate within existing open source communities to create new standards like Atom, OpenID 2, and OAuth, we also work with companies all over the web to be partners on the OpenSocial project and [a totally non-evil implementation of] Facebook's Beacon on TypePad. Basically, we think that playing well with others makes for a better platform.
Takes a Digging, Keeps on Ticking.
Question: How should you greet the onrush of visitors to your site when you get onto the homepage of Digg or Reddit? Answer: Not with a Database Connection Error. A lot of people have asked us over the years, "Why does MT default to generating static web pages?", even though there's the option to publish fully dynamic pages. The reason is clear, as WordPress core developer and Automattic employee Donncha O Caoimh says, "[U]nder high load, serving static html files will always trump dynamic PHP requests." With Movable Type, the default settings have always been set so that you have a site that's reliable right when you're about to get the most traffic, without having to hunt down, install, or configure any plugins. So when a crowd of people come to your site, they can read what you wrote (and click on your ads, if you're into that sort of thing) instead of wondering what everybody was looking at.
A Dashboard That Measures Success
One of the biggest goals in redesigning our dashboard for Movable Type 4 nearly a year ago was to get out of the habit of merely listing a bunch of recent entries, comments, and pages. The truth is, you need those listing screens to manage your blogs, but on a dashboard that stuff just ends up looking like another inbox full of clutter to manage. So MT4's completely customizable dashboard has a powerful set of visual representations of your blog's behavior, from charts of the number of entries your authors have created to sliders that let you zoom in and understand why you got more comments on certain days. And of course there are lots of third-party plugins for the MT dashboard, to integrate statistics and information from third-party services like your number of FeedBurner subscribers.
Design Matters
Movable Type was the first blogging platform to use completely CSS-styled, standards-based templates by default, and since then we've worked like crazy to give smarter, prettier tools to everybody for customizing design. We have a strong belief that creating a theme or editing a design shouldn't require knowing PHP or figuring out whether parameters go in the order of "format, before, after" or "before, after, format". In fact, template tags shouldn't be writing HTML markup for you at all -- so in MT, they don't. And the tools for managing and customizing those designs look as good as the designs themselves, as you can see with the Movable Type Design Assistant. The Assistant is designed to help regular bloggers think about their blog's design with some of the insights and perspectives of a professional designer. And the StyleCatcher system built into Movable Type lets you install styles from repositories on the web, without having to manually upload a bunch of theme files to your server.
Plugins Are Good. Not Needing Plugins Is Better.
As the platform that first popularized blogging plugins, Movable Type has tons of them. But even better, there are a huge number of features that would require either the installation and configuration of a plugin, or moving to a completely different platform like WP-MU if you were using WordPress. Instead of wasting time trying to install all those plugins, and then keeping up with the inevitable security updates for them, or compatibility updates whenever you upgrade your software, you can use MT's built-in features and just worry about what you want to say. Some of the key features that are built in to MT that you might want to try out:
- Manage an unlimited number of blogs with one install
- Share templates and widgets across all the blogs in your system
- Easily manage tags
- Upload, manage, and tag any kind of files with a complete Asset Manager
- Lots more items that are still on the WordPress wishlist, like image resizing, searching of posts and pages, OpenID, a customizable dashboard, a better WYSIWYG editor, and more
And when you finally do want to do more with your site, in addition to all of the plugins which are available, you can also add in extensions to the platform like the Movable Type Enterprise Solution, for integrating with business-grade infrastructure, and Movable Type Community Solution, which enables features like user profiles, forums, Digg-style ratings, recommendations, and more.
Get Support Right From The Source
One of the signature features of Movable Type is perhaps the most hidden: Our excellent support. Instead of search around on Google for information that may or may not be out of date, or trying to figure out an obscure chat channel to get answers, paid users can simply file a help ticket and get access to the best support team in the business. It's just one more way to focus on what you want to say with your blog, instead of fighting with technology problems.
And Lots More To Come...
Now, the truth is, we're far from perfect. There are still a lot of times when MT installation takes a lot more than five minutes, though we're working on fixing that. (But of course, having a lot fewer security updates means you're not updating your blogging software all the time, so it can even out.) And MT can import all of your WordPress entries, comments, pages, and content with no problems. Right now, our whole developer community is focused on improving the raw performance of the core platform. But there are also still tons of new features we want to add to the platform as soon as possible. Whether it's adding support for OpenID 2.0, OAuth, or OpenSocial, making the application faster and more responsive, or working with the community to bring users new themes and plugins, we're 100% focused on our responsibility to continue to invent the future of blogging.
Movable Type is a blogging platform that's reliable, innovative, beautifully-designed and full-featured. Having spent years being both inspired and humbled by the creativity of the blogging community, we'd also like to point out that Movable Type might just be the right platform for a blogger like you.
Seeing the maintenance of a Movable Type publishing infrastructure as the first responsibility in a job description shows the transformation that's happened. We've come a long way from "I hope the new IT hire knows a little bit of HTML, too." And whether you're interested in hanging out with scientist at AIBS, or working for a major media company, or bootstrapping an up-and-coming new blog network, we're working to make sure that having "Experience with Movable Type" on your resume is something that distinguishes you from the rest of the field.
- Maintaining and extending several Movable Type and PHP-based Web sites featuring science and biology-oriented content
- Managing a junior staff member who's primary foci are end-user support for a staff of 15-30 and Web site maintenance
- Serving as IT Department liaison to Department Managers (3-5) in the headquarters office, working to understand needs, propose effective solutions, arrive at consensus, and implement
- Manage (and assist with management of) relationships/contracts with vendors supporting technology infrastructure for the headquarters office, and vendors assisting with technology project implementation
- Assuming responsibility for technology infrastructure maintenance and growth for non-IT staff
This week marked a quiet, but significant, milestone for the world of journalism done through blogs: Joshua Micah Marshall’s work on his widely-acclaimed Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for Legal Reporting.
The Polk awards are astutely described by Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News as “the Golden Globes of American Journalism” on his Movable Type-powered blog. But the New York Times’ Noam Cohen points out that Marshall’s win, and indeed his team’s work as a whole, offers a decided contrast to the hoary old cliché of the blogger as a pajama-clad guy with a more attitude than ideas.
To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise — that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And most reassuringly, it showed that fair numbers of people out there were paying attention.
At Six Apart, we’ve always believed that blogs are nothing more, and nothing less, than a new medium, native to the web and nimbler than the ones that preceded it. That means that, even though people have been falsely debating “blogs vs. journalism” for the better part of a decade, the truth has always been that this is just another medium in which a great journalist can do great work.
We’re thrilled that a distinguished member of our community has set this precedent. We know that it’s only a matter of time until similar honors, such as the Pulitzer Prizes, understand that it’s not the choice of medium that makes a work legitimate, but rather the efforts of those who care about sharing their ideas that define a work. And we build tools like Movable Type with the hope that they can be one small part of helping talented teams like the TPM staff achieve work that not only is on par with, but indeed can even eclipse, the best journalism in the world. Though it’s an infinitely smaller tribute in comparison to a Polk award, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mark the moment by naming Talking Points Memo as a Movable Type Featured Blog.
One footnote: As Joshua Marshall himself noted after his win, a big part of why he’s been able to do so much with Movable Type is due to the help of an incredible team that typifies what the MT community is capable of: Apperceptive. He says, “[T]hey come with our strong recommendation. And if you’re looking for people who do this kind of work I’d be happy to answer your questions about our experience.” And as fellow MT blogger Jason Kottke notes, Apperceptive is “the little engine that runs a large chunk of the professional blogosphere”. So our congratulations as well to the team that helps MT power some of the biggest sites in the blogosphere.
One of the fundamental goals for Movable Type for almost seven years now has been to advance the state of design on the web. Some of the recent developments from the MT community highlight how that attention to aesthetics is alive and well.
First, as we described on the company news blog recently, we've made the Design Assistant for Movable Type available as a completely free design resource for the MT community. While the process of creating the Assistant was gratifying, we think it's just as important to look at the design-oriented philosophy behind its creation:
It's easy to make tools to create a design, but it's far harder to create tools that help you get in the mindset of making good tradeoffs.
So today we bring you the Design Assistant for Movable Type. Sure, you can click through it and knock out a cool custom design really quickly. But along the way, you'll start to see how a few common grid/column layouts can impact the way your content is perceived. The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources.
But as with everything in design, it's not merely about the ideas that influence the work, it's about the experience of seeing a design in action. So try out the Design Assistant for yourself and see what it inspires you to create.
Of course, in a community full of smart designers, inspiration can come from the creativity you find in other MT sites. It's something we think about for the Movable Type community worldwide, as our European team has shown recently on its blog, too. And Aaron Bailey of 601am, the highly-regarded blog development shop, has helped make it easier than ever to find and share beautiful Movable Type-powered sites, with the launch of Movable Love.
Movable Love is brand new, but already features tons of clever and unique MT sites, each of which can help inspire your own designs to new heights. And once you've got that beautiful new site built, you'll want to make sure and submit it to the growing collection over at Movable Love.
Here's the story: Movable Type 4.1 continues the amazing momentum that the Movable Type platform showed in 2007, when we released MT4, offered up the one-two punch of the Enterprise Solution and Community Solution, and capped off our best year ever with the release of MTOS, Movable Type Open Source.
So what's next? Movable Type 4.1, a free update for all users of MT4. A stable release of Movable Type Open Source. The new Professional Pack, packed with industrial-strength content management power. And a new personal license for the MT Community Solution. More power, more potential, and more personalization. There are dozens of new features in MT 4.1, and even more unique capabilities if you opt to add on one of the packs we've made available to the community. Improvements for writing and managing assets make MT easier to use than ever, smarter tools for managing and create templates make MT's publishing even more powerful, technical improvements to APIs and the templating language extend MT's tradition of technological innovation, and support for user avatars and new add-ons for community features help turn your MT-powered site into a real community.
And then there's the new add-ons, like the Professional Pack which gives you the ability to customize the data fields for your entries, pages, users, and even categories and folders. Bundled with the smart new Universal Template set, you can build a business website in minutes, and completely control the entry forms you use to publish. Plus, the Community Solution, which we announced to a fantastic response late last year, will shortly be available for personal users, letting you add forums, profiles, user-submitted posts and more to your blog, all wrapped up in a gorgeous new set of specially-designed templates.
- Write. Now. We've cleaned up the screen where you write your entries, making the layout even smarter and easier to understand, and showing useful info like when a post was created as well as when it was published, and even if it's been edited, which is handy if you've got multiple people reviewing your content. There's even a convenient link for sharing your entries once they're published, with a friendly box for entering your recipient's email addresses, and automatic integration with MT's address book.
- Template Sets. The smartest templating system
in blogging just got even smarter -- you can now install entire sets of
templates, which control the output of your published content, styles,
and even your XML feeds all at once. The Professional Pack (see below)
includes a killer template set, but you'll be able to get template sets
from the MT community at large, as well. And with new plugins, you can
even create and distribute or sell your own sets. Learn more about Template Sets.
- Template Sanity! Ever drive yourself nuts trying to look up the right tag to use in your templates, or get frustrated trying to share elements between your different blogs or sites? No more. Global templates make it easy to share widgets or even entire templates between two, twenty, or two hundred different blogs or sites in your MT install. And intelligent tag help automatically provides you with a link to the appropriate help documentation for the template tags you use -- right within the Movable Type interface. And all that is on top of MT4's smart syntax-highlighting rich template editor, which even prompts you for the right template tags to insert while you're editing.
- The best API support in the business. MT was the first blogging platform with Atom support, and now we've got full support for the IETF Atom Publishing Protocol (RC5023) standard. Plus, we've beefed up MT's API support with the ability to create, edit, and manage pages through third-party clients like Windows Live Writer, just like you've been able to do with entries.
- Get a handle on your assets. Still struggling with an old blogging system that doesn't even help you manage your files and images? Then it's time to jump to MT4.1, which improves MT4's powerful asset management system with new screens that show you every time an asset has been used. ("This PDF is linked to in 3 of your entries." "Two of your pages have this image inserted." "This audio file hasn't been used.") And you can bulk-manage your assets, making it just a few clicks to add tags to as many files as you want.
- Show us your pics! Short for "User pictures", and also known as avatars, Userpics are built in to the system, and you can use them on your published entries, and even on your comments. And Userpics have all the power of MT4's asset management system, so you can upload, manage, and tag them just like you would any other image or photo in your system. Seeing the faces (or icons) of the members of your community goes a long way towards creating a sense of "belonging", and makes it easy to identify the regulars that help your blog's community thrive.
- Some crazy next-generation geeky stuff! This one's an experimental feature, just for the geeks: As of MT 4.1, the Movable Type templating language is now Turing Complete. MT 4.1 introduces some new looping constructs, additional variable types (like hashes and arrays) and control flow structures like If-ElseIf-Else). You can finally port Tetris to the MT template language!
- The whole damn thing is faster, and can take whatever traffic you throw at it. With all the new features in MT4, we've had to work hard to make sure the speed of managing and publishing your site stays peppy. So MT 4.1 introduces a number of new performance enhancements, like blog search results that are significantly more speedy. And as always, MT defaults to publishing standard, scalable plain HTML documents for your entries -- so you can enjoy the attention when your blog gets on Digg, instead of worrying about whether your web host is going to yell at you, or having to figure out a technical solution just to handle the traffic.
But wait, there's more!
As we mentioned with the release of Movable Type Open Source, we want to make sure our paying users know they're getting the most bang for their buck. So we're launching the Professional Pack, a benefit for all users who purchase a supported commercial license. And soon, it will be joined by a new personal license for the Community Solution, that makes it easy for you to get the power of full-featured forums, rich community blogs, and slick new member profiles for your personal blog. (In the meantime, you can check out the screencast to find out what's in the Community Pack.)
Packed With Power
The Pro Pack lets you flex your creative muscles with MT, turning the world's most powerful blogging platform into a full-fledged content management system. Some of the highlights:
Universal Template Set for Business Websites. Your company or project can get up and running with a professionally designed website using MT's new content management features using the new universal template set. Just click to start a new site and you're automatically provided with a beautiful homepage, default pages for common information like an About page or a Contact page, and a full-featured blog. Even better, you can start customizing the content of any section of the site just by clicking on it.
- Custom Fields. Now you've got complete control over the fields that you use to publish your site. Extend your entries and pages with drop-down lists, radio buttons, or just plain text fields. Add additional fields to your author's profiles, giving you more information about the contributors on your site. And you can even tweak the fields used to describe your system's folders and categories, storing any details you want to keep track of. Plus, field customization even extends to letting you easily rearrange the fields in any posting form through drag-and-drop, so you can make sure authors have the easiest experience possible.
Thank You
We've been thrilled by the incredible amount of support and attention that the community's given to MT, especially during the MT 4.1 beta. The hard work has paid off -- the launch of MT 4.1 also marks the first official stable release of Movable Type Open Source. But most of all, as we said with the launch of the MT4.1 Beta, it's just getting started. After more than six years, it's exciting to see that Movable Type is still helping you do amazing things by putting the power of personal expression into the hands of an amazing community
Today we are releasing a mandatory security update for all Movable Type users, to address a potential security issue which has been reported by a third party. A detailed description of the vulnerability can be found later in this post, but to summarize: In affected versions of Movable Type, there are certain circumstances in which a blog template may be rendered dynamically via CGI in an otherwise static publishing context. If you use Movable Type to publish PHP files (or JSP or ASP pages) and have embedded within your Movable Type templates sensitive information (such as database connection information), then that sensitive information could potentially be exposed and viewed publicly.
There is no record of a customer having been affected by this vulnerability. Here's the Update Advisor, a simple scorecard to let you evaluate this new release.
Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.01a and 3.36
- Release Type: Security Release. The potential vulnerability has not yet been exploited in the wild.
- Mandatory? This is a mandatory update for all users of Movable Type.
- Performance Implications: None.
- Plugins Affected: None.
- Templates Affected: No changes in your templates are required.
- System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
- Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.01a and MT 3.36 are free updates for users of any version of MT 4 or 3.3.
- Upgrade Fatigue: No planned updates are scheduled until the release of MT4.1, which is currently in beta. There will be no further releases before MT 4.1 unless significant security issues are found which require a 4.0x release. It has been 116 days since the last recommended update to MT4 and 273 days since the last recommended update to MT3.
Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page.
In addition to the updates to Movable Type 4.01a for MT4 users and Movable Type 3.36 for MT3 users, we have issued updates to Movable Type Enterprise and to the Movable Type Community Solution and Enterprise Solution. If you are on one of these platforms, you should be contacted by your account representative about these updates shortly.
We also recognize that many Movable Type users are still running version 3.2. If you are running version 3.2, you can download a Comments.pm. Please note that this patch is only intended for use with Movable Type version 3.2.
While we routinely perform security evaluations and do regular testing of Movable Type, and strive to make Movable Type as secure and reliable as possible, we sometimes have to release these updates in order to address issues found outside the course of our scheduled testing and release process. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of having to update your software.
We're pleased to note that a Japanese language Movable Type-based Newspaper Blog product has been selected for a Good Design Award by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization, a group that has been recognizing and awarding good design in such fields as consumer goods, industrial products, public facilities, and even ecological activities since 1957. This is the first time any blog-related product has won this award.
The Newspaper Blog product was created jointly with Matsuno Lab of Chuo University in March of this year to improve the information literacy of Japanese elementary school children. The idea behind the product is to have students research stories, write their own articles, and create a newspaper, and in the process develop an appreciation for newspapers. The design and content management capabilities of Movable Type enable the students to easily publish an online or print newspaper while learning valuable computer skills and gaining first-hand experience on how a blog enhances communication.
Matsuno Lab has worked on various projects in the past to improve students' information literacy. Matsuno and Six Apart teamed up in this case to develop the Newspaper Blog using the Movable Type Enterprise Publishing Pack. Students who worked on these newspapers reported that besides it being a fun project, they wanted to continue publishing, and felt more interest in reading newspapers.
The Newspaper Blog is not just for schools - it's available to Japanese businesses for internal communications pieces like department newsletters, and for external uses like marketing campaigns.
Here's a picture of one of several newspapers built on Movable Type. This is from Hamagawa Elementary School in Okinawa. Didn't the kids do a nice job?
(Click on image to see the whole front page.)
Every hero needs a nemesis. Today's Movable Type Featured Blog, The Superest, catalogs a neverending game of illustrative oneupsmanship, with a series of charming and clever drawings that follow two simple rules:- Player 1 draws a character with a power.
- Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.
It's madness, genius and super powers, all in one slick site, with an effusive community of fans who are understandably enthusiastic about each day's drawings. It's the kind of clever blogs that we love, showing off the fact that you cancompletely change the design and aesthetics people expect from a blog, and publish content that's rich and expressive, and end up with a result that's a real winner. Well, at least until tomorrow's hero defeats it.The Superest is the brainchild of the Philadelphia superhero team-up of Kevin Cornell, whom you may know from his drop-dead-gorgeous Movable Type-powered blog Bearskinrug, and Matt Sutter, whom you can find sharing his works and wares at InkFinger.
