Six Apart News & Events: July 2006

If we mentioned a hosted web service that’s been around since 1999, offering powerful blogging, RSS publishing, RSS aggregation, a river-of-news style view of posts, and the ability to export any of your feed lists as OPML, you’d probably think “Didn’t Dave Winer make that?” Well, he probably did, but we’d also be describing LiveJournal. One thing we’ve found in visiting the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week is that lots of people still don’t know about the pretty cool technologies that power the 10 million-strong LiveJournal community.

We’ll be publishing some detailed geek explanations of LiveJournal’s technology soon, including such mellifluously named staples as Memcached, MogileFS, Perlbal, and Djabberd. But if you haven’t given LiveJournal a second look in a while (or in half a decade), it might be worth revisiting. This is especially true now that cool new features like LJ Talk, our Jabber-compatible instant messaging integration, are launching soon. And if you happen to connect to some pretty cool communities as a result of playing with the technology, well, that’s okay too.

This week is O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention in Portland, OR, and if you’re attending, you’ll see the Six Apart team all over the convention. Come check out our sessions:

Here’s our calendar in chronological order, so you know where to get your Six Apart OSCON fix at all times:

Monday:

• Werewolf with Artur Bergman, 9:30PM in D139-140.

Wednesday:

• Keynote: Trying to Suck Less with Anil Dash, 9:30AM in Portland Ballroom.
• Stump the Band with Ben Trott, Artur Bergman, and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, 1:45PM in E142.
• Plagger: Pluggable RSS/Atom Aggregation with Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, 2:35pm in Portland 256.

Thursday

• A Relational Object Driver That Doesn’t Suck with Ben Trott, the hottest man in Silicon Valley, 11:35am in Portland 256.

Friday

• LiveJournal’s Secret Spinoffs with Artur Bergman and Brad Whitaker, 11:35am in F150.

This week’s issue of Time Out New York is running 6 of my photos of Japanese manhole covers.

I first saw the manhole covers while working in Japan in 2002. They are a subtle example of design in the public interest, making something mundane and utilitarian into something beautiful and, in some cases, highlighting features and sites unique to the area. The folks at Time Out thought so, too. The photos run with the cover story on “how to make New York better by stealing the best ideas from other cities.”

We just pushed out a sizeable update of the Movable Type plugin directory and thought we'd share with you those which are new and updated. Below are links to each with descriptions written in the authors' own words:

• NewEntryTemplate v1
  Categories: Authoring, Built for 3.2, Shortcuts
  Allows setting global or per-blog default content for entry text fields.

• MTIfCommenterEmailIs v1
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks, Community, Email
  This plugin adds a new MovableType conditionnal tag named MTIfCommenterEmailIs. It accepts two arguments: email (mandatory) and trusted. The aim is to recognise a commenter by its email address. If trusted is set to 1 then the comment must also be from an authentified source (typekey for example). You can use MTElse to add some code when the comment is not from the expected source.

• FileSize v1
  Categories: Built for 3.2
  Get the filesize of a file. Accepts inline MT tags.

• LJsubs v1.2
  Categories: Administrative, Authoring, Built for 3.2, Text Formatting
  If you're porting a LiveJournal to MovableType, this will make the transition all the more easier. This MT plugin contains a text filter that translates most LiveJournal-specific tags, and formats your entry according to normal LJ practice. That is, anything inside an lj-raw container gets left alone, and anything outside gets a linebreak appended to the end of each line. Other common LJ tags get translated, too.

• Moderate Via Delay v1.03
  Categories: Anti-spam, Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks
  The plugin has a junk filter that can moderate comments and trackbacks that are submitted a certain amount of time after the original entry was posted, or after the last comment/trackback was posted. You can also flag such comments as junk instead of moderating them, and even scale the junk rating so that it increases the longer the entry has been idle.

• AddComment v1
  Categories: Administrative, Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks, Shortcuts
  Allows posting comments right from Movable Type's backend. It adds an "Add Comment" form in the "Comments" tab when editing an entry.

• Macron v1.1
  Categories: Authoring, Built for 3.2
  Adds a button above the entry editing area to easily add a macron to any character. A macron is a "mark placed over a vowel to indicate that the vowel is long" (Webster). It can be used for example in romanized Japanese.

• MTMaps v0.6
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Web Services, Widgets
  MTMaps lets you easily create Google Maps that show where each of your blog entries occurred. It's perfect for PhotoBlogging, TravelBlogging, diaries, or collaboration - any time you want to show the world where your blog is happening!

• myComments v1
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks, Web Services
  This plugin sends approved comments to myComments service (http://mycomments.idslab.com.ar/)

• TagSupplementals v0.02
  Categories: Authoring, Built for 3.3, Categories, Keywords, Linking, Search, Tagging
  TagSupplementals Plugin is intended to provide supplemental features, in addition to the standard MT 3.3 tags for tagging.

• EntryCategoryEntries v0.01
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Categories
  EntryCategoryEntries plugin allows you to list entries included in the primary category of the current entry. This plugin can be used only in the entry context, which means the inside of the MTEntries container or the individual entry archives.

• Duplicated TBPing Lookup v1.02
  Categories: Anti-spam, Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks
  An MT 3.2 JunkFilter plugin for rejecting duplicated and/or repeated trackbacks from the same source URLs. These kind of trackbacks seem to be spams or caused by authors' mistakes.

• Delicious Tags v0.01
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Categories, Tagging, Web Services
  This plugin allows you to import and display your del.icio.us tags into your MT blogs.

• Update-n-Ping v0.12
  Categories: Authoring, Blogosphere, Built for 3.2, Community
  Update-n-Ping plugin enables MT to send update pings when updating published entries and adding newly published entries.

• Tagwire v0.26
  Categories: Keywords, Tagging
  Tagwire Plugin provides an easier way to handling "tags" in Movable Type 3.1x and 3.2.

• Captcha v0.02
  Categories: Anti-spam, Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks
  "Captcha Plugin" is an anti comment-spam plugin which generates and verifies CAPTCHA tests that most human commenters can easily pass but current spambots cannot pass.

• Show System ID v1
  Categories: Administrative, Built for 3.2, Widgets
  Show System ID integrates display of blog, entry and category ID numbers directly within the MT interface.

• Granular Interface Styling v1
  Categories: Administrative, Built for 3.2, Shortcuts, Widgets
  Granular Interface Styling adds extra classes to the MT interface to allow for more detailed customization.

• Socializer v0.1
  Categories: Authoring, Linking, Tagging, Web Services
  Add socializer link to your entries.

• MTGoogleMaps v4
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Rich Media, Template/Tag Helpers, Web Services, Widgets
  MTGoogleMaps is a plugin that enables you embed Google Maps in your weblog entries and templates.

• webSSearchy v3.2
  Categories: Built for 3.2, Search, Web Services
  webSSearchy is a plugin which enables your visitors to easily search more related pages in the web space with a help of your own suggesting search queries, the AJAX technique, and Google, Yahoo Web Service API.

• NotifyWho?! v1
  Categories: Administrative, Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks, Community, Email
  NotifyWho?! is a plugin written for Movable Type 3.2 which enables blog administrators to specify exactly who should receive comment and TrackBack notifications for each individual blog. The can be sent to the entry's author (the default), to a list of arbitrary emails or both.

• LivePreview v1
  Categories: Authoring, Built for 3.2, Text Formatting
  LivePreview is a new plugin that finally brings live previewing to Movable Type. A live preview, perhaps the most requested feature yet, allows you to view an entry in your weblog's context, i.e. with all the styling applied to it, rather than with Movable Type, as with the default previewing mechanism. It has several advantages, the biggest being that you no longer have to save and publish your entry to view it in context. Hence, you can identify any potential problems with your entry well in advance of publishing it. A screencast of LivePreview in action is available!

• Google PageRank v0.1
  Categories: Statistics, Web Services, Widgets
  This plugin allow you add the Google PageRank of the current blog into your pages.

• Google Analytics v0.2
  Categories: Administrative, Blogosphere, Statistics, Template/Tag Helpers, Web Services
  This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics codes to your weblog.

• Akismet v1
  Categories: Anti-spam, Built for 3.2, Comments/TrackBacks, Web Services
  Filters the contents of incoming feedback using the Akismet service. Feedback can be scored based on whether Akismet deems it spam (bad) or ham (good).

The You are Here Project is a documentary project by Blue Chevigny and Flynn Larsen. They're driving across the country, with no set destination in mind, "looking for truer and more subtle stories of ordinary Americans at this moment in history."

In each new city they are posting to their blog unedited picture and audio clips. When they return to New York they'll put their multimedia assets through a more rigorous post production, but while they're on the road their blog is a good fit as a casual method of distribution.

I love this project for a few reasons. First and foremost, it is a simple expression of one the core competencies of blogs - helping people connect and communicate more easily. I also love the minimum role that we had on the project as tech advisors. We did design an "admin" screen where Flynn and Blue could add new stops (with links and thumbnails) to the front page, but that was the extent of the programming and design involved. We spent more time working with the team talking through their needs, and we ultimately settled on a much simpler solution than we initially expected to, mainly using Vox instead of Movable Type.