Well, I'm finally recovered from the weekend of playing audio technician at the sold-out 2005 BlogHer conference. Got to meet several fellow MT and TP bloggers in attendance, like ProNetter Jenifer Hanen (pictured left), Christine Halvorson, Lynda Keeler, Gina Hughes and Ronni Bennett.

ProNetter Niall Kennedy from Technorati was in attendance and took some great photos.

Journalist JD also has some great BlogHer photos posted here.

Here's Mary Hodder making a comment in the main hall.

Unfortunately I was so swamped with getting the audio equipment to work right and then running mics during the sessions, I hardly had any time for photos and missed most of the general...

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Shutterbug, one of the most popular magazines for photographers, has just published a piece entitled " How Photographers Are Making The Internet Work For Them". Covering some of the basics of photoblogging, and providing links to a few prominent sites, it's a good introduction to this important community:

Photographic enthusiasts tend to be rather individualisticit is just you and your camera and its definitely not a team sport. However, once a photograph is made, what do you do with it? Rather than just filing pictures in shoe boxes once they are created, it is natural for most to want to share their view and perspective of the world, that dimension of reality and life they find...

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PubSub, the search notification service has relaunched their site with a host of new features. It's simpler than ever to subscribe to a feed of results for a keyword search, you can find blog matches easily from their database of over 6.4 million weblogs, and there's downloadable sidebars available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

In all, it looks like a great leap forward for the platform.

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an interview with Steve Broback about the upcoming Blog Business Summit that's well worth reading if you want to know what to expect at the event, and what's coming in the realm of business blogs.

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Google's just announced their AdWords API beta, letting you access the reporting system for your ad campaigns using a SOAP interface.

There's some terrific potential for adjusting content and campaigns to be even more responsive to results, as well as outputting reporting functions into a weblog format using publishing APIs like Atom and Metaweblog. We'll be on the look out for creative uses of Google's new service.

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The 2005 Black Weblog Awards has just posted its list of winners, with Blog of the Year going to Daily Views, Pop Culture, Rants and News and the achievement award going to George Kelly of All About George and Negrophile, both powered by Movable Type. Congratulations to all of the nominees and winners.

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One of the most elegant Movable Type-powered web applications we've seen in a while: poetc. Making use of TypeKey and an interesting timed commenting form, poetc lets you contribute your lines to a collaborative, constantly-evolving poem.

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The atompub-format has just been updated with Internet-Draft 05, available as a text document or as just a list of diffs if you want to see what's new in the latest version.

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If you'll be in Santa Clara, CA, at the end of this month, you'll want to take a look at SDForum's Vertical Leap, an event focused on vertical search. "Vertical search" is a catch-all term for searches in specific categories of content, and topics of focus include shopping, travel, classifieds, and of course blog search.

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Newsday's Patricia Kitchen has a column on how to improve your career through blogging. Patricia asked for some advice from our own Mena Trott:

If you feel as though you must write about how you hate your job and don't do any work all day, look into features that can keep your laments private. You can set up passwords for your blog so that only a small number of close and hopefully trusted friends can read and comment.

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This is going to be big. I can feel it. - Six Apart Professional Network: Helping your career with blogs - December 6, 2004 08:17 PMLink: Six Apart Professional Network: Helping your career with blogs. When I was a senior at Fordham, me and my...

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After playing with technorati for a while, I decided to look at the pinging side of things.

I've been using pingomatic for a while, but of late my pings don't seem to have been getting 'out there'.

Is pingomatic dead? I don't want to have to go back to pinging 20 different sites on every update.

Is there an alternative to pingomatic out there?

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Though it's short notice, we'll have a number of Six Apart staff members participating in some events in San Francisco tonight where bloggers are gathering. We'd love to meet you there.

First, with the release of the Tags plugin for Movable Type and LiveJournal's announced support for tags due to launch shortly, it's only natural that we'd be at Tag Tuesday. Organized by Technorati and Flickr, this should be an interesting event for geeks who are really into tagging, or who want to find out what's coming next with tag technology.

We're also always interested in Photoblogging, so some Six Apart staff will be at the Bay Area Photobloggers event at the Apple Store in San Francisco. Based...

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With the newest addition to our collection of Power Tools, we've made some interesting new functionality available for Movable Type users. The Tags plugin lets you easily add tags to your Movable Type entries, by modifying the Keyword entry field to allow you to enter tags, and automatically creating categories for each of the tags you submit. Creating archives for tags or including the tags in your XML feeds then becomes simple.

The Tags plugin also makes use of Movable Type's alternate application template functionality.

Brad Choate is one of our developers on the Movable Type team, and long before that he was a member of the Movable Type development community. Brad created Tags both in response to demand for a better user experience for labeling content and to show off some of the newly-polished features in Movable Type....

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TechnoratiPingURL

The URL to which the update ping is sent when blog owners have chosen "Technorati" as a target for recently updated pings.

Permalink

...

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Sabre's development team has just released Rico, a javascript library for creating rich applications using AJAX technologies. Available under an Apache license, a lot of common visual and data-manipulation functions are bundled into this cross-browser AJAX implementation. The offering comes complete with demos of the most common effects.

The library comes to us via Jeff Veen, who offers some excellent perspective on designing for the subtlety that's possible with these new techniques:

ot all that long ago interaction on the Web was a lot simpler -- you clicked a link, the page you were on disappeared, you waited a bit, a new one appeared. No feedback was really necessary. Clearly,...

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Blog update pings

When you create a new entry, you can have Movable Type automatically notify a number of services that keep track of recently-updated weblogs. When they receive notice, the services check your site to determine if it has changed since the last time you sent a ping. If it has, your site will be marked as updated.

weblogs.com, blo.gs and technorati.com have been provided for your convenience, but you can specify any number of other arbitrary services which support the weblogs.com XML-RPC ping interface (http://www.xmlrpc.com/weblogsCom) by adding the URLs for those...

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Adding a New Notification Service to Ping

Problem

You want to automatically notify an additional ping service of an update to your weblog.

Solution

Add the notification service's ping URL to the list under the "Publicity/Remote Interfaces" section of the New Entry Defaults Settings tab.

Discussion

Notification services track which weblogs have been updated and when. This is achieved through alerts or "pings" to the service when they've been changed.

Movable Type has the built-in functionality to optionally ping these services with each new entry post. To manage these settings...

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Many people have asked me how to display the status of comments and trackbacks on the power edit entries screen. This hack will guide you through the process of adding two fields, as shown by the screenshot. One is a drop down menu for the comment status while the other is a checkbox for Trackback status.

First of all, open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 2584 find my $row = $obj->column_values;

and add underneath it $row->{"allow_comments_" . $obj->allow_comments} = 1;

Next, around line 2688 find $entry->title(scalar $q->param('title_' . $id));

and add underneath it $entry->allow_comments($q->param('allow_comments_' . $id)); my $allow_pings = $q->param('allow_pings_' . $id) || '0'; $entry->allow_pings($allow_pings);...

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In a week of milestones for both our company and the whole weblog medium, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention one of the most remarkable: Bloggers made the cover of Fortune magazine.

Though it sounds like a lyric to a hip-hop song ("we're blogging on the cover of Fortune"), both of our co-founders Ben and Mena Trott are among those pictured in the magazine. And the article itself lists blogging as the most important technology trend to watch in the coming year. We can't help but agree.

In a similar vein, there's a nice follow-up to the naming of weblog pioneers as PC Magazine's People of the Year last month, as the MIT Technology Review blog has reminded everyone of their past accolades for the teams and acknowledged the omission of Paul Bausch from their original TR100 listing....

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MT Blogroll has been updated to be compatible with Movable Type 3.2 and includes some new features too: • Improved UI - The UI has been drastically improved to fit in better with 3.2, you can see the new UI elements on the screenshots page. Along with the UI there are a few javascript tricks I've borrowed from Movable Type that should make your life somewhat easier • Greater Control - With MT Blogroll 2.1, you have far more control over your links, you can customize the link adding page in a fashion that is similar to MT and display the links with ease on both static and dynamic pages. • Priority Sorting - I have added a priority field and this has become the default sorting column. As a...

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