Since it came out last night, I've upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.0 RC2. Not sure what's new as the changelogs haven't been published yet, but so far I've noticed that the rich text mode now produces properly valid XHTML.
I'm aware of an issue before the update of TypeKey basically not working at all, and some people can't use their OpenID sign-ins here either, so I'll look into those and report any remaining issues to SIx Apart.
Update: Feh, would appear that TypeKey still isn't working.
Please excuse any mess you see around here in the next week or so. I'm finally unifying my Movable Type installs (why, oh, why did I ever fork them!) and then upgrading to MT4. Things that you should notice broken: Code snippets, comment ability, etc. If you do come across something that isn't the way it ought to be (like the comment function), please let me know. Danke.
In the Movable Type Support Forums, Gingermonkey asked a question that will become more and more relevant as the official release of Movable Type 4 draws near:
"After reading that MT4 supports previous versions templates, I have been trying to get templates from thestylearchive.com to work. MT4 is able to connect to the thestylearchive.com, view & select the template -- and files get copied into mt-static equivalent directory. However, the template doesn't reproduce properly at all (in fact neither did any of the templates choosen from thestylearchive.com, only templates built in to MT4 and those from the MT4 Style library. Is this a known bug with with Movable Type 4.0 RC1b, or am I not setting up something correctly?"
Well, for those of you that don't know, the new Movable Type 4 templates are much, much cleaner. Lots of unnecessary code has been whacked and the end result is a meaner, leaner template. Now, the good thing about cleaning up MT4's default templates is that they're much more manageable. Hurrah for clean code!
The bad thing, however, is that all of the styles over at TheStyleArchive.com are designed to work with the MT3.35 default templates. Now, MT is MT, so the default templates from MT3.35 still work with MT4. If you copy the old MT3 templates over into your new MT4 install, Stylecatcher can still pull in the styles from TSA and your site will look as the designer intended...
I know that using the old templates certainly isn't ideal, and because of that, we're working to get the TSA styles functional with the MT4 default templates. Realize, however, that it's going to take some time as converting stylesheets isn't always as simple as search-and-replace.
In the meantime, rest assured that MT4 is shipping with some really beautiful styles that will tide over you styleophiles.
I've released RightFields 1.2. Download it here. You can read this entry to find out about what's new in this version, and future plans for the plugin. This forum topic has more a more detailed list of features and changes. Many thanks to all who helped test the beta versions!
So now that I've got Movable Type 4 running on here and the basics are working, I now need to get the bells and whistles that I had previously back up and running.
I would have kept a shorter version of this as an addition to the previous entry, but Google Reader doesn't show updates to posts and so quite a number of you wouldn't see it. To be fair you're probably not interested anyway but nevermind.
I'm now running Movable Type 4.0 RC1, and in doing so blatantly ignoring the advice about not installing over a production environment. That said, I have backed up all 20 megabytes of the database, just in case.
MT4 is big - around 13.5 MB when unzipped - and on my 2 megabit connection took around half an hour to upload. Thankfully it's pretty easy after that as the upgrade is very simple, although as this is an early release quite a few plugins haven't been updated yet and so I've had to disable quite a few of them; though none of them are particularly big or important.
So, if you can read this then the upgrade was a success and most things are working. The interface is very different but I'm liking it so far.
Update: It's taken me a little while to get things working properly, mainly because of a MT template tag used in the wrong context on one of my custom templates (<$MTArchiveDate$> in the Entry template) which MT 3.x had no problems with but MT 4 seems to throw it's toys out of the pram over. To be honest it's not really MT's fault as the tag was in the wrong context, but it would be nice if this was told to me when the entry was saved. As it happens, it just said everything was okay and then didn't rebuild me pages for me, though thankfully I found out when doing a manual rebuild what the problem was.
Of the plugins I've had to disable, Fast Search is the one I'm going to miss the most - until it's updated for MT 4.x we're back to MT's default CGI-based search which is much slower. I've also had to disable the plugin which crossposts entries to LiveJournal for the time being - sorry LiveJournal people.
Other plugins which I've previously used have been folded into MT's core. OpenID Comments is now built-in, and so when you sign-in you'll have the option of using OpenID, TypeKey, LiveJournal or Vox to authenticate your comment. There's also the ability to add user accounts and so you'll be able to have your own account with this site in future if I enable the option, but as I've previously mentioned I'm sticking with allowing anonymous comments for the time being. Markdown and Smartypants are now built-in, as is SCode for providing image CAPTCHAs, although I'll still be using Comment Challenge which still seems to work okay in 4.0. Some plugins that are still enabled may or may not work, such as MT-Notifier which sends out the email notifications of new comments.
Rich text editing is now included, so you can format posts without having to use HTML, and it seems to work pretty well too - I'm using it for this post. In particular, adding images to entries is far easier than it used to be. There's also the ability to preview your entries as they would appear when posted (i.e. with your blog's design) and not just how the text will look.
I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, mainly because I've spent most of the evening retro-fitting my templates into the new software, but so far I'm really impressed.
Hey, folks, if you’re in New York City this weekend, be sure to swing by the Burger Bash that Six Apart is helping to sponsor. It’s got good beer, great burgers, and later on in the evening Rock and Roll Hall-of-Famer Grandmaster Flash is going to be spinning.
Though our company is based in San Francisco, we’ve always had a lot of Six Apart staff and community members from New York City. So this summer we wanted to join in with two of our favorite New York blogging communities to help show our appreciation for New Yorkers who use LiveJournal, Vox, Movable Type or TypePad.
In conjunction with Gothamist and Serious Eats, come join us this Saturday July 28th at 5pm for the Burger Bash at Water Taxi Beach. Tickets are only $13.50, and there are going to be some amazing (and unique!) burgers at the Bash, so we thought it’d only be appropriate to sponsor the first keg of the day. (Only for those of legal drinking age, of course.)
Both Gothamist and Serious Eats are the kind of fantastic Movable Type-powered sites that show off how passionate communities make all of our blogging platforms really sing. And if you’re a member of any of our Six Apart-powered communities, then let us treat you to a beer to go with your burgers. Read up on the Bash, including directions to the venue, at A Hamburger Today. And grab your tickets now at Ticketweb.
(Thanks to Jason Perlow for the photo from last year’s bash.)
Blogs hosted on our TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox services have experienced some downtime today due to a power outage in San Francisco, and we wanted to provide you with the basic information we have so far, as well as where to look for additional updates as we have them.
Here’s what we know:
We are truly sorry for the frustration and inconvenience that you’ve experienced, and will provide as much additional information as possible as soon as we have it. We also appreciate the commiseration from the teams at many of the other sites that were affected, such as Craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, hi5 and several others.
Yep, Six Apart merges with Facebook. The truth is, we merge in improvements to our source code from lots of companies and contributors that make fixes and patches to our open source platforms, not just the Facebook team. Oh yeah: We meant that we merge code.
Okay, the headline’s a little sensationalist, but we figured it was okay to draw some attention to something that’s pretty special and unique. In honor of our presence at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference (OSCON) this week, we wanted to highlight the amazingly productive and generous communities that contribute to a lot of the open source technologies we base our work on.
Take, for example, memcached. Memcached is a clever memory caching system invented by our LiveJournal team that makes it easier to scale up dynamic web pages using inexpensive database servers. In just a few years, memcached has been adopted by almost every major social media or Web 2.0 site, a pattern that’s only accelerated since LiveJournal became part of Six Apart. (You can find all our open source projects at code.sixapart.com.)
The list of memcached users is astounding: In addition to our own LiveJournal, Vox and TypePad (and support for memached is coming in Movable Type 4.0), sites that use the system include Digg, Twitter, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Bloglines and Slashdot. Both David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, and Adrian Holovaty, the creator of Django, recommend using memcached to scale their platforms. Maybe it’s because, like those frameworks, memcached was created in the context of solving the problems in creating real, working web applications.
But perhaps the most impressive example of the power of memcached’s open source community is the work that Facebook has done, providing extensive improvements and fixes to the system while also supporting the community with events like the recent memcached hackathon. The truth is, a lot of companies or sites were happy to just use the system and contribute by participating on the mailing list or reporting bugs that they’d found, and that’s the nature of contributions in most open source communities. Memcached’s GPL2 license didn’t require Facebook to share their contributions back with the community, but to their credit, Facebook became partners and peers to the existing LiveJournal/Six Apart team that had done the core development on memcached. As they outlined on their blog last year, the team at Facebook did the right thing for the community and shared their work for others (including us!) to benefit from.
And that gets to the core of why we at Six Apart support open platforms, open APIs, and open formats so extensively: We’re a company that makes communications tools. We think that it’s only appropriate that the tools should be as open as the conversations they enable. We don’t just want to grow our own company, we want to grow the entire community of people using the web to connect and communicate.
We’ll be sharing more about the open source technologies that Six Apart teams have created, but here’s some quick starting points if you want to brush up:
They’re all open, they’re all free, and they all work like crazy. And those are just some of the projects that we work on. If you’re at OSCON this week, be sure to check out the presentations by a bunch of folks from our team at Six Apart, where almost all of these technologies will be discussed.
The presentations start tomorrow with a Keynote by our own Brad Fitzpatrick, who is Chief Architect at Six Apart and the chief architect of a lot of the technologies mentioned here. There will also be a session on how we used these tools to help TypePad scale while improving our processes at the same time, and a presentation that marks the debut of TheSchwartz, an amusingly-named but exceptional new piece of open source infrastructure that lets you easily distribute tasks to a scalable job processing system.
(Thanks to Mary for the image.)
Adam Cleaveland from Cleave Design sent over this question, and I thought it was particularly relevant, especially in light of the new approach Movable Type 4 takes with it's default templates:
"I am having a very hard time understanding the "Templates" within MT. I'm used to just being able to make a change within the header.php in Wordpress that affects every page. However, with Movable Type, it seems that if I make any chance in the template, I have to make that change in every different template I have (Main Index, Master Archive, Search Template, Comment-Pending Template, Comment-Error Template, etc., etc.). Am I just completely missing something? Or is this the only way to go about doing it?"
The question he raises is a good one. The first thing is not to confuse "template tags" with "template modules". As MT is currently bundled, each "template" has all of the code needed for a full page. The main index page has all of the html header information, the banner has all the banner information, sidebar, etc. Now, it&aposs nice because most information like the blog name and description and meta tags are all stored in MT and get put into the page by using template tags (i.e. ). But essentially if you want to change the HTML for the header or the banner or anything else, you have to change it on that particular template. So, for example, adding a div above the banner would require opening each template and adding the div above the banner.
Now, there are ways around this; in fact, that&aposs one of the reasons Six Apart is changing it&aposs approach with the new Movable Type 4. It makes a lot more sense (even though it&aposs a bit more confusing for the beginner). The basic approach is this: commonly used chunks of code are stored as template "modules" and then called to from each template. Makes MUCH more sense because you don&apost repeat code. If the header code is the same for all of your pages, then the only thing you need on each page is a call to the template module () that holds your header code. It&aposs all in one place.
Of course, sometimes you&aposve got things in those modules that need to be custom for each page, like the entry title in the HTML header area. Movable Type handles nearly all of that stuff with template tags. Put in between your tags and Movable Type figures out the context and puts the right information in there. Sometimes, though, there are things you might want to, for example, add to your sidebar for particular pages; Movable Type allows you to set variables and call them from your templates. This gives you the ability to add specific content or check against a Boolean "switch" to turn parts of your module on or off.
Lots of developers use a similar approach with PHP. Common elements like the header and footer get created as index templates and then included with a simple PHP include. This saves you considerably on rebuilds because MT is only building one file that all your pages include instead of building the same code for every page. It&aposs not always the best option, but it's often worth considering.
The learning curve for this new approach is slightly higher because you have to be able to follow the linking; but the power it brings you is tremendous. Instead of trying to scrounge through all of your templates and replace code each time a change is made to these common elements, you can just change it in one place and MT will build it out across your site.
Reading some recent discussions on the ProNet mailing list about the installation process for Movable Type 4, I started wondering how many users always install or upgrade MT by extracting the files from the distribution on your local machine and then uploading the files individually—that is, dragging the directory or directories of extracted files to your server in an FTP client, which requires the program to send each file one at a time. With so many files to upload (1100+ for MT 3.35, 1800+ for the latest MT 4 beta), this can take quite a while.
Except in the rare instances where I only have FTP access to a server, I never install or upgrade Movable Type—or, for that matter, any other web-based software—in this way. If your MT site is hosted on a server running a Unix-based operating system and you have command-line access to it (either directly or through your host's control panel), you don't have to, either. Instead, try the following steps.
1) Download the version of Movable Type you want to install. Choose the .tar.gz (for Unix, Linux, Mac OS X servers) option for the download.
2) Find the downloaded file. Let's say you're installing Beta 7 of MT 4; this means the file will be called MT-4.0-beta7-20070717.tar.gz.
3) Upload this file to the directory on your server where you want the MT directory to go—in other words, upload it not to your MT directory (if it already exists) but one level up; for example, into your cgi-bin directory.
If you've ever uploaded MT file-by-file, you'll quickly see how much faster it is to do it this way.
4) Open a shell (command-line) connection to your server using ssh or the control panel on your host, and navigate to the directory where you just uploaded the MT distribution file.
5) You may, at this point, want to copy the string MT-4.0-beta7-20070717 (or whatever version you're installing) to your clipboard, so you can paste it instead of typing it for each of the following commands. After doing that, do this (and by "do this" I mean "type this into your shell interface and hit Enter"):
mt-static in the static web path; if an mt-static directory already exists, you'll end up with the new mt-static being moved within the old one.)
6a) if you're installing MT for the first time on this server, you probably don't want the mouthful MT-4.0-beta7-20070717 in your URL when you access MT, so do this:
mt, use that in place of mt in the above command.
6b) If you're upgrading rather than installing for the first time—let's say your current version is in a directory called mt in this same directory—do this:
MT-4.0-beta7-20070717 into mt, replacing any duplicate files. Since the MT distribution doesn't have an mt-config.cgi file (you have to rename it from mt-config.cgi-original), you don't have to worry about your configuration getting overwritten.
That's it! If you care to, you can now delete the upload and the original copy of the extracted files:
Last year TypePad introduced a new feature called "TypePad Widgets." To accompany this feature we wanted to provide a way for 3rd parties to easily inject their widgets onto TypePad weblogs. We initially started down the path that everyone else did: by re-inventing some XML based protocol/schema for packaging and describing widgets. It didn't take us long to realize that the methodology we were devising was far too complicated for the vast majority of people. Then someone had the idea, "why not just let the person POST the widget via a web form?"
And we're happy to see others embracing these kinds of APIs as well -- Google recently deployed a similarly simple Widget API for their Blogger service. They now allow 3rd parties to post widgets into Blogger blogs via a simple HTML web form, and it should be pretty easy to reuse your TypePad widget work there as well.
I've just released a new beta version of RightFields 1.2. This version fixes a number of bugs and includes dynamic publishing support for most of the plugin's new features. Please post all questions, bug reports, and comments about this beta to the RightFields 1.2 Beta Testing forum.
Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type 4. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!
Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type 4. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!
Entry Post is a plugin for Movable Type that enables visitors to your site to submit entries using a form. Visitors do not need a user account and they do not need to login. Similar to posting a comment, they...
Our friends over at FeedBurner, who sold out to joined the team at Google recently have just announced that pro-level stats and custom domains are now free. Two of their best paid features, Stats PRO and MyBrand, which lets you use your own domain name in the address for your feeds, no longer require payment.
Of course, this is a perfect fit for combining with your existing blogs. If, like FeedBurner's own blog, your site is powered by Movable Type, then you can just grab the MT-FeedBurner plugin and it'll do all the heavy lifting.
If you're on TypePad, you're in luck, too -- TypePad's got some exclusive features for integrating your statistics and reporting between your TypePad blog and your FeedBurner account. TypePad's domain mapping feature is a great match for MyBrand -- you can make sure everything on your site is all under your own domain name.
Categories: Administrative, Built for 3.3, Printing, Web Services, Widgets
A month ago, we launched the Movable Type 4 beta with word that we’re on a mission. The good news is that, since then, hundreds of thousands of you have joined us in the effort, downloading the beta or trying out various demos or just blogging about what you’ve seen.
Each week since the announcement, we’ve been releasing new beta versions with significant updates — hundreds of bugs fixed, and tons of new features along the way. So we’re excited to announce that we’ve reached the next phase of the beta test: It’s time for you to give MT4 a try.
Now, this is still not production-ready. There are still rough edges and improvements to make, so you shouldn’t run your real blog on it. But the fundamental changes we were making based on your feedback have settled into a fairly stable base; You can get a good sense for how MT4 is going to feel by working with the beta now.
There are a few ways to try out MT4, with some of the most exciting ones coming from the energetic MT4 community.
Once you’ve chosen one of those options, some key steps:
If you’re testing a migration from an older version of Movable Type, swing by the Works with MT4 wiki page to see the status of which plugins are tested to work with MT4. (Your templates should work as-is.)
Now, as we move from the fundamental re-architecture of MT to the fit-and-finish phase of the beta process, we’re seeing more and more people joining the community. It’s time for you to join as well. If you’re new, or you haven’t had a chance to check in, be sure to check out movabletype.org and subscribe to the feed to see the latest information about what the community is up to.
And most of all, thanks to all of you who’ve brought your ideas and inspiration to the MT community.
It looks like some of the spam bots out there are now taking the Comment Challenge plugin into account, as I've had some automated spam where the extra question has been answered correctly. Though I've always had some spam get through, until now it looks as if it had all been typed in manually by a human, and not the work of a spam bot. Comment Challenge, by the way, is the thing that makes you type 'elephant' when you post a comment here.
Considering it's been over 10 months since I installed the plugin I'm impressed that it has taken until now for the automated bots to work around it - I thought that something so simple would be trivial to work around. Obviously it wasn't.
As it happens, only 4 spam comments got through, and they were all junked by other anti-spam plugins (namely Akismet and SpamLookup) so they never appeared on the site. But it's a slightly concerning new development.
(UPDATE: There was a problem with 1.0b1. Please try 1.0b2, linked below, instead.)
I've just released a beta version of my first plugin for Movable Type 4.0: Bookmarks.
You can download 1.0b2, which has been tested with MT 4 Beta 4, here. There's no documentation yet, but it's fairly self-explanatory. When you're on any page in the MT CMS, you can bookmark it. Each author has their own set of bookmarks.
Here's the impetus for this plugin. On the ProNet mailing list, a number of people have expressed reservations about the thoroughly revamped navigation in MT 4. My feeling is that the new architecture represents a big usability improvement for two general categories of users: 1) the administrator who needs to manage dozens or even hundreds of blogs in an enterprise-scale installation, and 2) an author with a single blog, whether a blogger who's installed MT for himself or someone who's been provided with their own blog as part of a larger installation.
However, there's another type of user: a single author who creates and updates content on multiple blogs. Not an arbitrarily large number, but more than one. That describes me, for example: the MT installation that runs kshay.com and staggernation.com actually has 16 separate "blogs," some of which function as blogs and others that hold various pieces of content. With the Main Menu in previous versions of MT, it was easy to create a new entry, or view entries, templates, etc., in any blog with a single click. In MT 4, having first to switch to the intended blog, then click on the desired action, feels like a step backward in terms of usability.
The Bookmarks plugin is intended to restore some of that ease of navigation, especially for someone who authors multiple blogs.
Please post all comments, bug reports, and feature requests concerning Bookmarks to this area of my plugin forums.
We’ve got a lot of different audiences for our blogging tools at Six Apart, and Movable Type might have the broadest of them all — it bridges everything from individual hackers running MT on their laptops to giant corporations running thousands of blogs on their intranets.
To the original blogging community that we come from, though, we get a lot of weird looks when we talk about how exciting it is to work on business and enterprise blogging. There are a lot of variations on the question, but basically the thing people want to know is, “Why do you guys care about business blogs so much?”
In short:
The longer answer is, we’re immensely greedy monsters! No, no, that’s not right — the truth is a lot simpler: If it’s done right, making blogs work for businesses helps get more people blogging (that’s our mission, remember?), and it makes a day at work just a little bit more pleasant for a lot of people.
Because while those of us who work on our own or for smaller companies can say “Well, I want to work on a Mac.” or “I’m only going to use Firefox.” or “I’m only going to use open source applications.” (and most of us at Six Apart fall into those camps), most non-technical people not only don’t have that option, they don’t care enough to find out how to do that stuff. You use what your boss tells you to, and even if you have other preferences, they’re not worth the fight when you’re just trying to get your job done.
So, instead of having to use some horrible “Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server” thing, we think people should be able to use real blogs from a company that actually cares about blogging. And to do that, we have to make blogging tools feel “safe” to bosses and CIOs and CTOs and IT departments and other offices full of people whose job it is to say “no” to anything too new or unproven.
As a result, we get a little bit of skepticism on both sides. People who are zealots, who see blogging as some kind of religion, say it can’t possibly be “real” blogging if it’s integrated with enterprise software or portals or Microsoft Office or things like that. And conservative technologists who want to manage risk in a global business say it can’t possibly be a reliable business tool if it comes from a community of hackers and idealists and, well, troublemakers.
We think we’ve reached a good compromise if both sides are a little bit skeptical, but still willing to be pleasantly surprised.
Outside of the blogosphere’s echo chamber, most people who want to publish a page on their intranet at work are still stuck asking a geek down the hall to make the changes, and then waiting 3 weeks for it to happen, and another 3 weeks for the fixes for the mistakes in the first update. Those people deserve a tool as powerful and simple as blogs, if only to help preserve their sanity. And just maybe, some of those people will start to think “Hey, there really is something interesting about blogging.”
For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven’t tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It’s just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.
There’s one final point that’s probably worth mentioning: We bring blogs to businesses of every size because nobody else can. That’s not bragging — it’s just a reflection of how new this medium (still!) is. The giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies don’t care about blogging, so they aren’t going to spend time and effort to educate people about it. (Especially if it comes at the expense of Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server.)
And individuals who work with blogs don’t have the resources to educate companies on a global scale about the potential of blogging, or to build up a sales and support team to back up business customers, or to partner with the Oracles and HPs and Intels of the world. We’ve done all of these things, to show businesses that blogs are credible business tools.
It’s probably an obvious point, but making blogs business-ready isn’t sexy work. Almost no coders think “Man, I can’t wait to go home and hack on middleware integration this weekend!” But bringing blogging to a bigger audience, an audience that’s still skeptical of this medium, and unfamiliar with its potential, takes exactly that kind of hard, unsexy work. As a company founded by bloggers, that’s benefited so much from blogging, we frankly felt it was our responsibility to help as many other people and companies benefit as possible. So that’s why we do it. We might not always get geek cred from cynical, jaded bloggers for it, but there are a couple hundred million other people out there who might see the benefits. And that’s pretty fantastic.
The fact is, blogs are a better, cheaper tool for businesses to use for many types of communication. But they’re also still a young tool that most companies haven’t even gotten a moment’s thought from most businesses yet. We think our community can change that, and we hope this gives you a little bit better understanding of why it’s important that all of us succeed in the effort.
A lot of bigger media sites took note of our launch of the MT4 beta, and we wanted to take a look at some of the most notable responses. The entire MT team has been ecstatic about the warm reception we’ve gotten from the blogosphere, and a lot of these press stories help explain why.
PC World, Network World, and InfoWorld all ran with the story, with a… world of praise for what we’re trying to do for business blogging:
The new version’s enhancements keep Movable Type ahead of the rudimentary blogging capabilities vendors such as IBM and Microsoft have begun putting in their collaboration platforms. “No one has anything as robust as Movable Type. Six Apart has a big head start,” said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst.
InfoWorld’s (MT-Powered!) blog gets in on the action, too. Steve Fox says, “Not content with being the social software of choice for everything from one-man megaphones to major corporate sites, it now wants to function as a content management system (CMS) for whole Web sites. Two years ago, this would have been laughable. Today, it may not be. Blogs are at the center of many major sites, and a basic template approach to everyday Web pages (not just ones we think of as blogs) is viable.”
Another article looking at the launch from a Serious Business perspective is CIO Magazine:
Six Apart is moving toward the enterprise, said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester. He cited their broad support for running MT4 on the Linux, Windows and Solaris operating systems, as well as their support for databases including MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. “They are clearly doing the most interesting blogging stuff in the enterprise,” he said. … The move to create an open-source version of MT “could be terrific,” he said, because it could stimulate the open-source community to develop applications and extensions, while putting Six Apart’s business blogging application at the core.
There were even more mentions of the launch worth reviewing, including internetnews.com, a great overview from Reuter’s Eric Auchard and eWeek’s Stephen Bryant offering his take.
Of course, we value feedback from bloggers as much as praise from the press, and those responses have been great, too. Richard MacManus was first out of the gate with one of his typically insightful analyses over on MT-powered Read/Write Web, saying “MT4 is also pushing itself as ‘a social media platform’, which allows users to turn their audiences into communities. In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors - including sharing photos, videos, and audio.”
On TechCrunch, our old friend Duncan Reily offered up a pretty thorough look at the new beta, concluding, “As a vocal critic previously I can now say in all honesty that a leopard can change its spots. The new version of MovableType looks wildly appealing to me as a blogger.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick offered, “It sounds like they are taking a very smart approach; learning from best of breed related apps (many of which they also own) and developing towards where users appear to be headed.”
Perhaps one of the most satisfying groups of people that we’ve gotten positive feedback from is our Professional Network members, who rely on platforms like MT for their careers. Michael Klassen at Thinking Cap was wonderfully warm in his post:
There are lots of reasons why Thinking Cap prefers Movable Type as its preferred web publishing platform for client sites. But our main reason for liking MT is that they are committed and passionate about their core product, Movable Type. We’ve just done a brief test run of the first Movable Type 4 beta version, and we very much like the direction this software is headed.
There are many, many more responses to the announcement, of course, and a lot of the reaction so far predictably focuses on things like our MT open source project. But we’re most excited about the new capabilities we’ll be introducing for bloggers, as well as the features that should help an entirely new wave of people start blogging. Thanks to everyone for the kind words and extraordinarily positive reaction so far!
As you've probably heard, last week Six Apart announced the first beta release of Movable Type 4, sporting a thoroughly revamped user interface and dozens of great new features. Meanwhile, I've been working on a new version of RightFields, which due to various other commitments has progressed rather slowly. I've only implemented about half of the new features I hoped to get into the next version. However, in order to focus on developing a new version for MT 4, I've decided to go ahead and release RightFields 1.2 (which works with MT 3.33) with the current feature set. If there's a particular feature you've been waiting for that didn't make it into this version, I apologize. This will be the last version of RightFields for MT 3.x. RightFields 2.0 will be a from-the-ground-up rewrite, partly because of changes required by MT 4 but also because the plugin's code has grown rather unwieldy, and is overdue for an overhaul. The result, if all goes well, will be much more flexible, extensible, and easier for me to enhance in the future. But for now, you can download RightFields 1.2b1 here. The major new features:
NY=New York. This lets you change the displayed values at will without worrying about losing data stored in existing entries.
I've had a hard time finding my way around the current Movable Type documentation, especially the tag reference, and I've heard some others saying the same thing; so I put together a new site that lets you get at all of the tags in a number of different ways. If you find it helpful, cool; if it's not your thing, that's cool too. Just trying to make it easier to find/use MT template tags.
Some of the things still on my to do list:
MTTags.com -- Hope it's a helpful!
A bittersweet moment. I had intended on announcing LivePreview 1.2 today (it's already been available for quite a few days!) but Byrne beat me to it with an even bigger announcement.
But then sometimes one of the engineers will throw a curve ball. Like today, when I saw that Brad Choate, MT's lead engineer, created an honest-to-god real live preview feature for entries you are editing.
Yep, you heard me.
So now, when you click the "Preview" button from the entry editing screen, you will get to see what your post will actually look like on your blog. Awesome.
Awesome! Live preview is one of those essential features that I had always longed for until I threw it together in a plugin form. Now that it's folded into the core, it works in a much more elegant fashion than my plugin but I shall miss it, it was one of my favourites :)
For the moment, however, LivePreview v1.2 and the actual previewing process has changed (with the unfortunate loss of the slick screen dimming) to fix some of the biggest bugs with the plugin:
Goodbye LivePreview, I shall miss coding you!
Movalog Copyright © 2004-2007 Arvind Satyanarayan. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).
Another fun survey!
It’s only just come out a few days ago, but have you had a chance to dip into beta 1 of Movable Type 4.0 yet?
Vote or see the results of this survey.
If you’re reading this blog, you probably know a lot about Movable Type. It’s the power bloggers’ tool, made by people who just wanted to make a good, flexible blogging application. Over half a decade, it’s grown into a platform that even enterprises and global businesses use to publish to the world. Today, we’re returning to the mission that started Movable Type in the first place, building a community that wants to make the best, most influential blogs in the world.
It begins today with the Movable Type 4 beta release, a real beta process that will collect your suggestions, improvements, feedback, and most of all the passion of all of you in our community. We’re just at the start of that process, and we’ve already put in more resources than have ever gone into any version of MT.
If you just want the details and features and good stuff, there’s a free beta version to play with, and you’ll find out about all kinds of cool new features:
But before you dive into all the usual blogosphere chatter about what’s new and what needs fixing and how the features stack up, we wanted to explain why we’ve made this massive investment in Movable Type and its community. The truth is, Movable Type is how Six Apart got started, and one of those ideas that motivated us from the very beginning is that we’ve got a mission.
Blogging has made a huge difference in our lives at Six Apart, but had even more impact on the millions of members of our communities. And our mission is to bring the power and potential of blogs to as many people as possible.
To tell you the truth, it’s been a complicated path. Our core audience of Movable Type users, starting back in 2001, gave us two very clear messages.
You were tired of media that didn’t respond to the world you live in, and frustrated by companies that only used broadcast communications to talk to you. You didn’t think that keeping in touch with family and friends, or sharing ideas with like-minded people, should be limited by geography.
So we set out to reach all of those people, to teach them what MT users have always known, that blogs can help change the way we communicate. The change isn’t always 100% for the better, but it is definitely new, and over time, the benefits become clear.
We have three tools other than Movable Type here at Six Apart: TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. Each of them was designed to reach people Movable Type couldn’t connect to. And now that they’re all on the path to getting their audiences, we can take their technology, and the lessons they’ve taught us, and bring them back to Movable Type.
We started TypePad four years ago, to get a lot of the power that MT users had experienced into the hands of people who didn’t want to install software, and it’s evolved into a tool for serious bloggers, as well as great option for small businesses and even big-name publishers to get the word out without the technical requirements.
When the LiveJournal team joined Six Apart, it was a crash course in community, one that’s been challenging at times, but has also been immensely rewarding as we start to see what helps people really connect with each other at a human level. And it doesn’t hurt that the LiveJournal team invented a lot of the technology that’s helped grow not just our communities, but all of Web 2.0.
The success of all those Web 2.0 communities is something that greatly influenced our efforts in Vox, where the community lessons of LiveJournal were combined with one of the messages that our Movable Type community taught us early on: Sometimes we just want to talk privately to our friends and family, even when we’re blogging. A lot of the biggest challenges in blogging have come from not being able to direct the right conversations to the right groups of people, and so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to meet that need.
Which brings us back to Movable Type. As we’ve worked on each of these platforms, we’ve learned a great deal about what our earliest audience needed to move forward. From TypePad, it’s easy to understand how we can bring over elements like listing screens into Movable Type and efficiently reuse bits of the application. That makes it quicker to bring out new features, by reducing the amount of time they take to develop. But we’ve also learned a lot about power bloggers wanting to manage the non-blog content of their site, like standalone pages and media assets, right within the same tool. So powerful media management is built right in to MT4.
From LiveJournal, we’ve learned how important it is to support open, engaged communities, and so we’ve brought over technologies like OpenID and support for Memcached. But we’ve also seen what amazing contributions the open source community makes, and how much more comfortable people feel knowing that, instead of data lock-in keeping them tied to their blog, an open process of development makes them want to participate. And that’s greatly influenced MT4’s new open source initiative: Later this year the open source version ofMovable Type will be released under the GPL license.
And then from Vox, we’ve learned what it’s like to rethink the blogging experience completely, redesigning the user interface around the idea of presenting the information that matters. It should be effortless to share all the rich media content that makes the web so compelling, and connecting to the rest of our communities on the web should be easy. MT4’s completely new user interface bears witness to that influence.
All of these efforts have culminated in something pretty remarkable: That original audience of MT users has helped blogging become an incontrovertible success, in every realm from individual people talking to friends and family, to communities forming around every conceivable interest, to independent businesses being able to promote their efforts to the world. We measure success by how many new people we help to start blogging, and when we first launched Movable Type, there were almost no newspapers, television stations, radio broadcasters or publishers blogging. Today, nearly all of them are doing so, with many of them powered by Movable Type.
And those of you in that core audience of MT users, the individuals who’ve become “blog stars” and helped inspire a lot of these other successes along the way? We think you’ll all find a lot to love about MT4 and the revitalized community as well. Those of you who are newer to the community: Welcome. We think you’ll find there are some amazingly creative and innovative peers for you here.
In the coming days, we’ll get into the details of what’s new in MT4, and all the blogging goodness it contains. But this release of MT4 has been a long time coming, and we wanted to explain where our inspiration came from, to help set the stage for where our community is going next. We can’t wait to hear what you think, and hope you’ll check out what we’ve got so far.. Thanks for coming along.
Update: A number of users are telling us that when they access www.movabletype.org they see content from movabletype.com. It is possible that DNS changes made to facilitate the launch of the beta and the new website have not fully propagated. In the meantime, users should be able to access the website at the following alternate URL: beta.movabletype.org.
Show your colors with this durable, pre-shrunk, poly-cotton blend wallpaper:
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It was 5 am, and I was headed off to bed after pulling an all-nighter on a client's project; and who of all people writes me, but Arvind sending over the news that MT 4 beta has just gone public. I couldn't let this one go without saying something. While it's by no means the perfect content management system, I personally think it's one of the most powerful out-of-the-box blogging packages out there.
So, I came up with a list of ten ways the new Movable Type will rock your blog:
Continue reading 10 Reasons MT 4 Will Rock Your Blog...
The big news today is Movable Type 4.0 has gone into beta and will be open sourced once released! Rather than talk about the new features, over 50 new features with a completely redesigned and gorgeous new interface, I thought I'd take a moment to talk about what makes my head reel with Movable Type 4.0, it's developer features.
A long time ago, Six Apart posted the Componentization Guide, an overview of one of the biggest changes in Movable Type history that would completely change the way it was offered. Rather than separate products (Movable Type, Movable Type Enterprise), the application was made completely dynamic. So now, we would have one core product and all the features (such as what you would find in the former MTE) would be available through a new series of addons called components which would seamlessly integrate with Movable Type.
In order for components to properly work, Movable Type was rewritten in large portions and introduces several new features.
Continued reading Movable Type v4.0 (Athena): A Developer's Perspective...
Movalog Copyright © 2004-2007 Arvind Satyanarayan. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).
One source of duplicate comments for Movable Type is users hitting the “POST” button multiple times, either through a key bounce or because of slow response. One amelorative option is to arrange for the “POST” button to be disabled before the comment data is submitted. This not only avoids duplicates in most situations but is useful feedback to the user that, yes, they did in fact push the button.
This turns out to be a bit trickier than it seems, because some browsers won’t send data from disabled objects. This is a problem because the “POST” button contains critical information needed to process the comment request. It is not sufficient to simply move that to a hidden object, because that will cause problems for “PREVIEW”. My solution is to have a hidden object and engage in a bit of object renaming during the disable process. I have tested this on IE 6, IE 7, FireFox 1.5, FireFox 2, Opera 8 and Opera 9, and it seems to work.
This is the JavaScript enhanced “POST” button and hidden object. It replaces the existing “POST” button.
<input type="hidden" name="mode" value="mode" />
<input type="submit" name="post_comment" id="post_comment" value=" POST "
onclick="document.comments_form.post_comment.disabled=true;
document.comments_form.mode.name = 'post';
document.comments_form.onsubmit();
document.comments_form.submit();"
/>The Javascript disables the button, renames the “mode” object to “post” to put that as data in the submit, executes any other JavaScript expected to run on submit, and finally submits the form.
You will need to modify every template that accepts user comments. This will generally be the individual archive template and the preview comment template. It may also be the comment error tempate and the comment popup template.
You will need to modify the name of the FORM tag for comment submission. By default it is named “form” and this can cause hard to diagnose name collision problems. The actual name doesn’t matter, it is just important that it is unique. Use all lower case letters and underscores, nothing else. As you can see above, I renamed mine “comments_form”. I recommend doing the same unless you have a specific reason to use something else. When changing the name, change both the name and id tag and give them the same value1.
Once you’ve renamed the form, replace the current “POST” button with the lines quoted above. Change any instances of “comments_form” with the name you used for the FORM tag if that is different.
name attribute for the “POST” button must not be “post” as it is in the default template.id attribute value for the “POST” button should be the same as the name attribute value.id attribute value and the name attribute value for the FORM tag should be identical. This must also match the name following “document” in the JavaScript.value attribute of the “POST” button to whatever you like — it has no effect on submitting comments, it is used only as the displayed text in the button.1 This is because some browsers like the name attribute and some like the id attribute. There’s no good reason to not do both except for the extra typing.
Comment Registration is a plugin for Movable Type that enables readers to register an account on your site and login to post comments. Commenters register and login directly with your site, not via an external authentication service (this plugin does...
Ok, here’s a fun little blog mention that we’d been meaning to post after last week’s season finale episode of The Office. If you watch the NBC show, you’ll be familiar with the dark-hearted fan-favorite character Creed Bratton. In the finale, it’s revealed that Ryan had helped Creed set up a “blog”.
Of course (spoilers!) the blog itself turned out to just be an address at the top of a Word document. www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts wouldn’t have worked very well as a web address anyway.
But good news! Because NBC has a number of Movable Type Enterprise blogs for all their shows, they made quick work of setting up a real blog for Creed Thoughts. The show’s on hiatus for the summer now, of course, but there have already been some updates since the finale, sowe’re hoping the real Creed Bratton will keep blogging again once the show’s back in the fall. The idea has our inner Kelly Kapoor so excited!
(And don’t worry, Schrute fans, Dwight’s got a blog, too. Only he doesn’t like the word “blog”.)
Ever since I started developing plugins for Movable Type, in 2002, the homepage of this section of staggernation.com simply contained a list of the plugins. This made it difficult for you, gentle plugin user, to keep track of when new plugins or versions were released. So I've relaunched this area of the site as a blog. A blog? On a site devoted to plugins for a blogging platform? It sounds crazy, I know! Each current and future plugin listed in the sidebar will still have its own static page, as opposed to being tied to a blog entry, but I'll announce and describe new plugins and updates here, as well as other items—code samples, MT coding tips, links to sites that are using my plugins in an interesting way, etc. You can subscribe to the blog's RSS feed to keep up with all the latest plugin news.
This helps me unwind, really it does:
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Pick your poison and enjoy.
Well, in a recent article from Reuters titled "Blogging economists draw cyber-crowds", five of the six economists mentioned indeed use Six Apart's tools - four are on TypePad, the fifth on Movable Type. They've voted with their pocketbooks.
Seriously, it's great to read about customers succeeding with their blogs. Mentioned in the article are:
"(Dani Rodrik), the professor of international political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, started his blog in April at http://rodrik.typepad.com/."
"Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He blogs on global political economics at http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/."
"The Big Picture (http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/) following the market impact of everything from the Federal Reserve to housing."
"Brad DeLong, who teaches economics at the University of California at Berkeley (who) writes regularly at http://delong.typepad.com/."
"Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon, writes Economist's View at http://economistsview.typepad.com/."
So why are these economists blogging?
"It's a way for me to keep a voice in the conversation," Drezner said, adding that blogging has helped raise his profile. "The New York Times Op-ed page now returns my phone calls."
That must help make the dismal science a bit more sunny.
We get a lot of customer feedback here. A lot. All of it is incredibly helpful and informative. Much of it also helps affirm that we are doing the right thing for our customers. Here's one that came this week from a new TypePad customer Rick Stilley whose blog is at http://safezonellc.typepad.com/:
"I'm sorry to bother you but I just had to send this. I struggled for three days trying to set up (a popular free service) with its bloated documentation, snarling support (when you could get it), and its avalanche of code. Then I found TypePad. Salvation! Not only was I up and running (with ads) in under 30 minutes I was having fun doing it! Forgive me, I hope my singing didn't bother the rest of the support folks while I typed this out. Oh, yea. About that 30 day free trial...yea, right. Like I'm leaving."
I've taken the name of service out because it's our policy not to denigrate competitive services. Yes, we strive to make our stuff better than any other, but more important, we do everything we can to make it work great for the people who use it. In this instance, we seem to have the mark. Thanks for the feedback, Rick!
Harold Check is one of the quiet innovators of blogging, having started publishing his personal site Offhand Remarks ten years ago. In the interim, he’s contributed to dozens of blogs, most recently as part of our own team at Six Apart, shepherding some of our best blogs into existence, such as TypePad Featured Blogs and the TypePad Books blog and podcast series.
This week, as we’re taking a look at the first ten years of blogging culture, we’ve focused on technology pioneers like Dave Winer, individuals like Leslie Harpold who helped set the tone of the early blogging community, and experts like Michael Sippey who had recognized the opportunities around blogging in those early days. Today, we look at Harold’s role in helping see some of the first iterations of the complicated relationship between blogs and the larger media world.
I was working in the editorial department at Yahoo in 1997. I definitely remember that the landscape was starting to change — websites were moving away from being reference material to being about ongoing observation and even performance. Something was coming together. It seemed like the ability to pump out simple pages quickly, whether by hand or using scripts and templates, was within reach to enough people to make it really interesting.
Like most of the folks in the “surfing department,” as it was then called, I was voraciously consuming the ever-increasing amount of media that the web had to offer. And part of me wanted to process it in real time with something more substantial than email. The culture at Yahoo at that point was: Find something interesting, forward it to a group or your coworkers. Maybe the whole department. Maybe just close friends. And, of course, there was a lot of “Seen it.” Publishing snippets of news or interesting sites to a page seemed like the perfect way to record the information, share with anyone who cared, and then move on. I remember reading Sippey’s Obvious Filter and just thinking this was the perfect medium. close to real-time, curated, yielding both raw information and a point of view.
Taking the tactic that imitation was a minimally acceptable form of flattery, I started my own filter blog and called it “Offhand Remarks.” It lasted for about 4 months in its original form. I realized relatively quickly how taxing that kind of “always on” editorial schedule ultimately is. That’s just one reason I’m in awe of people like Jason Kottke who seem to have found an incredibly high level of output that they’re able to sustain.
Working on Offhand Remarks, even using simple perl cgi’s to iterate the page, it was easy to see that burnout was just a matter of time. I decided to turn my full attention of my other project — Media Nugget of the Day — which was a group site dedicated to sharing one good thing per day. I found that pace, and working with a group rather than on my own, was a lot more sustainable. Of course, that’s all relative. The Media Nugget lasted for about 700 entries, but ultimately even that site ended up in limbo. Someday soon, I hope to revive it, reinvent it, and see it thrive, but only time will tell.
It’s really nice to hear that people remember Offhand at all, since my tenure as a diligent blogger was so incredibly brief. Of course, it was easy to see that this medium was going to take off — especially as the tools reduced the overhead required. Part of me desperately wishes that I could have stuck it out until innovations like permalinks, comments, and trackbacks ushered in the fully realized conversational era of blogs. I think it would have been great to have made deeper connections with other writers on the actual sites we were running. That said, I’m really lucky that living in the Bay Area and working in tech allowed me opportunity to meet my online heroes — Bausch, Haughey, Kottke, Sippey, the Trotts — and even work with some of them. There are plenty more that I haven’t met, even now, and I still want to. I’m a fanboy myself.
One blog is never enough. There, I said it. Between work and personal life, I contribute to close to a dozen blogs. And there are always a couple more I want to start at any given time. I honestly don’t see how anyone can get everything down in one place. Maybe I’m a bit scattered. I prefer to think of it as enthusiastic and eclectic.
Seriously though, I think dedicating a blog to a specific subject is usually the best approach. It lets you go deeper when you’re not worried about modulating content and keeping everything balanced. I’m a big fan of the blogging networks that have cropped up in the last 5 years: The -ists, Gawker media, Weblogs Inc., Shiny — I think their strategy of creating niches and really exploring them fully is what makes a lot of their blogs really excellent.
I like to think I was around when the first subject-based network was started. In 1997, there were two employees working on Yahoo! Full Coverage (then quaintly called “Current Events” — I pitched the name “Yahoo! News Octopus,” but somehow that didn’t make the cut). It was basically was a set of pages dedicated to both long-running and short-term news stories. Each was created by hand, updated every 15 minutes, published in reverse chronological order, drawn from resources around the world, and archived for permanent reference. When blogs first started to be recognized as a breakout form of media, I remember thinking of those two surfers — and later the entire team of 10 or more — who basically spent all day blogging. I certainly think they were the first people whose entire job was to share links about specific subjects. Yahoo’s mission didn’t call for them to add any personal commentary to the links, so they were filter-bloggers by design, but I know how hard they worked to provide a even-handed, global point of view. Proto-bloggers, I salute you, wherever you are. I bet you’re glad you aren’t still adding stories to the Middle East Conflict page…
I’ve been really lucky to be able to work for companies where the needs of the business align really closely to my own passions and interests. And I don’t mean lucky in the sense that it was random. I sought out endeavors that I could support wholly and openly and enthusiastically without having to adopt some kind of pose. Actually, the very best thing about blogging as part of your career is that you have a heightened sense of responsibility to meet deadlines and keep publishing at a regular pace. It’s not just your readers and customers that are counting on you, it’s also your colleagues. I like that pressure. As a fundamentally lazy person, I require that pressure.
It’s interesting to me how fractured the landscape of the social media remains. Of course, I’m very happy that we aren’t all using one small set of applications to tell our stories (WordStar Blogging Edition 4000), but I sometimes worry that some really life-changing modes of communication could be getting lost in the jumble. As someone who likes to think of himself as, still, a voracious consumer of new services and innovative tools, even I find it really tough to maintain a clear view of the emerging trends and ultimately suggest good choices for the people close to me who rely on my curiosity to inform them. Of course, that said, I still love trying to keep up.
The other thing that continues to surprise and delight me are the staggeringly generous personalities that emerge online. This past year, I was incredibly energized by Ze Frank’s The Show. Just watching him encourage and amplify the creativity of his community was awe-inspiring. Yet, while I was watching Ze produce great piece after great piece, I realized that he was exceptional, but not alone. There are a lot of truly creative people putting out their own media right now. To me, 2007 reminds me a lot of 1997, like the tools are making everything easier, the pioneers have blazed a trail, and now it’s time for the rest of us to step up to the mic, or the blog, or the video camera. Take your pick.
Many people in the Six Apart community know Michael Sippey from his work as our VP of Products — when you see something like Amazon’s new widgets for TypePad, it’s Michael’s tireless advocacy and leadership that makes those sorts of features happen. But unless you’ve been watching the social web for a long time, you might not know that Michael’s sites like Stating The Obvious helped influence some of the fundamental thinking about blogging. We’re lucky enough to get to work with Michael, so we stole some of his time to ask a few questions.
You expect me to remember that far back? Sheesh, Anil. Well, in the early ’90s I was working for Advent Software in San Francisco, and in my spare time would use the PC and modem I had there to connect up to The Well. I was your classic Well lurker: not having been a BBS kid, I was fascinated by the social dynamics and the community that was being built there. Around that time that Wired launched; the first couple of years of that magazine had a big impact on me. As an English Lit major in undergrad, I guess it was inevitable that all that reading turned into writing; I sent a few emails around to unsuspecting friends in the early summer of 1995, and decided to find a web home for it in August.
You know, I kind of miss the long-form essay format. I used it to work out what I actually thought about a particular topic, and I’d draft a piece over the course of the week for posting on Mondays. I’d love to find that rhythm again. Sometime in ‘98 I started running “Filtered for Purity,” which was essentially a link blog on the front page of the site. As new ones were posted, old ones would disappear. Since Ben and Mena were still years away from shipping Movable Type, and not being a programmer myself, I didn’t have tools to automatically archive those links. So now I can just claim that the lack of permanent homes for those Filtered entries was “by design.”
I had no idea we’d end up here. Hoped, sure. What’s amazing is how quickly it all happened. When my parents came online their whole experience was through the AOL client. I told my Dad, who called it “Americans Online,” that he would be off that service and connecting directly within five years. It took three. And now they’re both sending me private messages on Vox.
I wrote a toss-off piece in 1995 called “The Three C’s of Computing,” which argued that these tools (connected PCs) are good for Creating, Consuming and Connecting. At the time we had OK tools for creation (think MS Office), a growing set of tools for consumption (think AOL), and a very nascent set of connection that wasn’t being covered by the mainstream press (boards, listservs, USENET, etc.). I wrote back then that the dream would be combining the three “into one, glorious future: creating, consuming and connecting all at once.” I think we’re starting to realize that dream with blogs, social networks, photo sharing, presence broadcasting, etc.
Blogging is definitely not a solved problem. Go back to the three C’s. We’re getting to the point where normal people can start to use the “creation” tools…but we still have a long way to go to make it easier. If today’s RSS reading experience is the end of the line for “consumption” then someone should take our industry out back for a beating. And “connecting” is only starting to get interesting — every application is becoming social, and as a industry we’ll find more interesting ways to traverse and use the network graphs. Then take all of that and tear it away from the desktop. Here in the US we’re still remarkably PC-centric; the mobile and ambient modes have yet to be leveraged effectively. (Look, I used the words “leveraged” and “ambient” in the same sentence. Drink!)
Oh, great — so you’ll blame me when this is all over with? I guess that’s OK, because I blame Carl Steadman. From Rats to Cats to Kid A in Alphabet Land to Suck.com to 99 Secrets to Diana Bear to Placing to his backpage column in The Industry Standard, Carl was waaaaay before his time. IMHO (as the kids say), this is all his fault.
And lately? Well, lately I’m really inspired by this guy Anil…oh, wait. Never mind.
What excites me right now is the idea of applying all of this bleeding edge tech to the real world, to people who don’t live within 100 miles of Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley. (Do they still call it that?) Bringing things like privacy and presence and syndication to people who don’t even care to know what all of it means, they just want to connect with their friends or run their business.
Thank you to Michael for taking the time to offer his perspective on the history of blogging. You can always keep up with Michael’s latest thoughts on his blog at sippey.typepad.com. This post is part of our ongoing series of posts about weblog history and its pioneers as the medium reaches its tenth year — earlier posts highlighted Leslie Harpold and Dave Winer.
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