04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

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2.1 (2002.05.02)

• Added webMaster, language, lastBuildDate, and pubDate to both RSS templates. • Added encode_html="1" to all RSS fields that didn't have it already. • Added Norwegian dates. • Added test for mt-check.cgi to determine whether we are running under cgiwrap or suexec. • Added a new global tag attribute encode_url (thanks to Scott Andrew LePera and others for the idea). • Changed the behavior of the publish flag in blogger.newPost; previously, if set to false the new entry would be saved as a draft. This was a bad idea, for...

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So yeah, we know that there's been an elephant in the room, sorry it took two days to announce that yes indeed, Six Apart did acquire LiveJournal. It has been hard not to react to all the questions and comments but we needed to finish all the legal documents and close the deal officially before we could say anything.

Finally I can spend some time talking about why we did this deal, what it means for LiveJournal users, what it means for Movable Type and TypePad users and for Six Apart and Danga. I hope that I can even dispel some crazy rumors.

As my posts tend to be pretty verbose, I'll first link to a FAQ that should answer a lot of questions that people may have. Once you've read...

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We should probably included a full explanation of TrackBack and how it works, but there isn't enough time to do it justice.

Needs refinement. This comes in out of nowhere. better define "resource" and "communication."

Weblog comments still require the use of that particular site's interface and the content is limited to that one weblog unless it is cut, pasted, and posted elsewhere.

Released in August 2002 as both an open protocol and new functionality in MT version 2.2, TrackBack was designed to provide a means of notification through a small message called a ping that establishes a link between...

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As you've probably seen, either through rumors in the blogosphere, in the FAQ linked on our company homepage, or in Mena's account on Mena's Corner, we (Six Apart) have acquired LiveJournal. A lot of the details are covered in those links, but there's some information that might be of specific interest to the Professional Network community:

(Re-)Introducing LiveJournal

Most of you are probably familiar with LiveJournal, but it might be worth reviewing what it is and how it works for those of you who haven't had a chance to take a look. As you might know, LiveJournal is a hosted journal service that's similar to TypePad in some ways. However, LiveJournal is strongly focused on community,...

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This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. It's basically a Movable Type interface to the extremely handy XML::Simple Perl module. The plugin will work with any well-formed XML document that can be retrieved via an HTTP GET request.

The GetXML plugin is extremely generalized, and to use it you'll have to understand the structure of the XML data you want to work with. There are specific MT plugins available for certain particular types of XML data, such as RSS feeds, Amazon content, and weather forecasts. If there's a specific plugin out there for the XML resource you're interested in, by...

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(Note: this tutorial is intended for MT versions 2.661 and earlier.) If you are new to Movable Type, and are using the default style sheets you may have encountered a surprise when viewing your weblog in various browsers. The reasons for this are many. First, different browsers (Internet Explorer, AOL, Netscape, Safari) on different platforms (Windows XP, Windows 2000, MacOSX) render CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in different ways. What looks one way on a Mac running Safari can look way different from a PC running AOL. Second, our dedicated team at Six Apart - Ben and Mena Trott - are Mac-ophiles, assuring that most of their default styles render well on a Mac, but not necessarily so...

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Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. Powerful customization gives you control over everything you publish and the elegant interface keeps things simple and clear.

Features

• Unlimited Blogging

Movable Type offers the ability to publish an unlimited number of blogs quickly and easily through a single installation of the application. And the platform supports posting by as many authors as you need, with no limit on the numbers of entries, comments, or TrackBacks the system supports. • Powerful management...

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Converts dates to UNIX-style epoch timestamps. Useful in the ESF Syndication format.

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Required: MT26x, MT3x, MySQL

What this does is let you put content from a syndicated feed in your MT Template. You need the feed plugin, and then you'll have to have some way of rebuilding the template occassionally so the content updates. The MT-Rebuild.pl plugin is perfect for this. I have mine set up to update every half hour.

First, you'll need the plugin. http://www.timaoutloud.org/code/mt/index.html#mt-rssfeed. The zip file will include the feed plugin and also the rebuild plugin.

Follow the directions in the package. All you really need to do (if you've got all the correct modules installed on your hosts server) is the following:

1. Go to your MT directory and make a dir...

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A couple of announcements from some companies making syndication clients today... first, NewsGator Technologies announces a new CEO, J.B. Holston, with founder Greg Reinacker becoming CTO of the company. And Nick Bradbury's announced that FeedDemon has partnered with Moreover to integrate their feeds into the application. Congratulations to both companies.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: super-cool live searching

Next Entry: More news on censorship of Iranian blogs

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Sandy Hamilton, Executive Vice President of NewsGator has just started a TypePad weblog called Corporate RSS Applied. The name says it all, and it's a useful resource for tracking the opportunities around syndication within organizations.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Professional Bloggers Association

Next Entry: Arithmetic plugin

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One of the biggest announcements at last week's Gnomedex conference was Microsoft's support for XML feeds in Longhorn, the next release of the Windows platform.

Offering robust support for RSS and Atom, as well as some new extensions for lists and a system-level library for building syndication-aware applications, the services being made available should allow for a new class of XML-aware programs.

In addition to the overview on the Microsoft Developer Network, the Internet Explorer team's blog offers some more insights into the development of these new features for Windows.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Ajax-Enabling Movable Type Comments

Next Entry: Sparklines and FeedBurner Web Services...

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Deeje Cooley's posted a link to a Macromedia Blog Authoring Survey. If you maintain a blog regularly, they're looking for your feedback, and survey participants who finish all 30 questions are eligible to win an iPod mini.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Easiest Upgrade Ever

Next Entry: Joe Gregorio on Secure Syndication

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Feeds.App is a plugin for publishing syndicated content into Movable Type templates with all of the power, flexibility and control MT users have come to expect. The plugin transparently handles Atom 0.3 and RSS feeds (in all its forms) and features dozens of tags including the generate a list of latest items across multiple feeds and quick layout widgets.

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worldKit, a simple mapping application for the web, has just added TypePad support to their documentation, including a sample site and map.

And of course, it's possible to integrate worldKit with Movable Type as well. Let's see some cool maps!

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Atom Syndication Format draft 05

Next Entry: Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

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Brandon Fuller's whipped up a great new plugin called MT-Enclosures, which adds support for enclosures of large media files in RSS feeds. Brandon's even put together a demonstration of how to use Movable Type with his plugin to publish an MP3 blog, which sounds pretty darn cool.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Caution amidst congratulations

Next Entry: Compassionate Syndication

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We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed).

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade....

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SBC's got a new promotion around a project called Project D.U. (short for Digital Universe) and they're promoting their internet service using weblog content as the bait to entice young users onto the web more frequently.

The project includes a syndication client that's pre-set with popular feeds from a variety of blogs, making it clear that SBC sees regular blog-reading as a good way to get subscribers to make regular use of the service.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: The best pop culture blogs

Next Entry: Photo Album templates and TypePad fixes

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Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker talks about the potential for blogs and syndication and is bullish on the entire market. The CBS Marketwatch story linked above gives a good summary, but if you want to read the analysis for yourself, you can read the 21 page PDF on Morgan Stanley's site.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: New York Times on advertising blogs

Next Entry: Newsday's tips on blogging

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