January 06, 2005
Six Apart acquires Livejournal
Hot as it can be, the news is SixApart has acquired Livejournal. Om Malik broke out the news yesterday. Here is Mena's explanation of the acquisition.
June 11, 2004
The Guru speaks
Anil Dash clarifies a few cribs we had about MT & 6A in general. Codey / Srijith, its for you.
I think we're putting a ton of effort into Movable Type, but I think we'll wait until the general release of MT3 and then it's upt o you to judge. I totally agree that devs like the ones you've mentioned (and many more) have helped us tremendously, and I'd (1) encourage you to ask any of the guys you mentioned if they feel unappreciated and (2) sign up for the developer network and see if you appreciate the benefits of it.
Read the whole comment.
June 07, 2004
The New MT Developer Network
Its only the developer network that's keeps MT from being relegated to dark corners of the web. For a company which is so heavily dependent on this community, alienating it should be sacrilege. Yet, the Movabletype.org developer forums remain deserted by the company. To actually experience that, try posting a question to the forum and look at the responses you get. You can hardly find a 6A employee on the forum. Its only the community all over the forums. So this time, they are setting up an ‘official’ developer network and giving away free developer licenses in the hope that developers keep working on MT. I might too, if I am ‘accepted’ as a developer. Apart from this, I am really groping for an incentive to develop a plugin or maintain existing plugins on MT. Ok, so does that mean I'll work for MT only if I get it for free? I never said that. Earlier, I was thinking of buying the discounted MT 3.0D. But then how long does that license last? What when I need to buy a newer license? Will it be cheaper? No, I predict. My only issue is the high cost for a basic version of the software, which is still not solved by the free licenses. Beyond my reach and beyond the reach of most Indians. Ok, End of rants on MT3.
May 27, 2004
MT 3.0 Discounts
Got a mail from SixApart today announcing the discounts for MT 3.0D. I was waiting for this mail since the day they launched MT3.0. The discount is a whopping 50 percent! That makes the cost of the personal edition to USD35 which is realistic. I most probably will go for it.
May 21, 2004
Blogtimes for MT3
I haven't really fixed up on MT 3.0 as the future CMS of my choice. Nevertheless, I am working on a newer version of MTBlogtimes which should be able to run on MT3. There have been numerous reports that it doesn't work with MT3. Also there have been a couple of bugs too. I think they should go in the newer version which could be a rewrite. I don't know. I haven't seen the new APIs.
May 16, 2004
MovableType Free?
On the 13th of this month, Sixapart announced the launch of Movabletype 3.0 developer edition. And guess what? Personal edition price - USD70! That for a version which yet does not support heirarchical categories. And what about the free version? Yes, that exists, but look at the restrictions - No more than one author and three weblogs. What? I cannot create more than three weblogs on my MT installation? Notice the difference. In the paid personal versions, they talk about 'active weblogs' number limit. In the free version, it is just plain 'weblog'. Now that means I cannot even create a static blog (without any posts. I do that for managing static pages on my site). So much for the commitment to a free version. Hmmm, I have been beginning to like TXP off late.
Update(11:00 PM): Thanks to all for pointing out the error. I really missed out on that post on 6A. Meanwhile kottke also agrees, the new licensing mechanism is really confusing. And yes, I'll wait for the discount code to see how much it works out to. I have been waiting to pay for an MT license since the time they announced the development of MT3.0. But sorry, I am still not going to shell out USD70 for this version. Mark Pilgrim sums it up. All said, Wordpress and TXP are still excellent alternatives to MT, I find, TXP especially for a photolog; not for ShutterBug, as it uses the most complex MT templates I have ever made.
January 06, 2003
The Timeline of Life
Looking at Victor's attempt at plotting a timeline of blog posts (as opposed to the frequency distribution of blog posts across a day in MTBlogTimes), it seems very trivial to plot the timeline of your life using MT and SVG.
It would be as easy as creating an index template for the SVG file, creating entries corresponding to the events you wish to include on your blog and generating the SVG file. It is quite possible. And if you get frightenend by the word SVG, go here.
MT Text Formatting
Frustrated by the confusing Wiki tools available, I was on the verge of coding a global filter `enable_simple_wiki' for MovableType. Thanks to Ben, half of my trouble has been saved. In the next version of MT, he is introducing a text formatting filter which will enable powerful text formatting right on the entry page itself. This will supersede global filtering options presently available(e.g. quotes formatting or stripping HTML tags) via plugins. The author can select filtering options at the time of entry itself. While, in case of wiki, this won't atleast keep the average Joe author away from the Text::WikiFormat perl module, a wrapper around the module would most likely be needed. So probably, I can defer the plugin coding till the next version of MT is out.
November 29, 2002
MTBlogTimes
Inspired by Brad
Chaote and Adam
Kalsey's never-say-not-possible MT plugins, I came up with a wierd thought
of plotting the post times of my blog in a timespan of 24 hours. And I knew
it might not be impossible, even though I had never ever peeked into the MT
code and plugin API. And here I am, after 3 days of poking and probing through
MT plugin API and Brad and Kalsey's plugins. This goes miles to prove how very
well Ben Trott has created the MT API. They are damn easy to code!
MTBlogTimes creates a chart which plots the time of your posts(in
a specified period) on a bar of the 24 hours of the day. I haven't found any
apparent advantage of doing so. Well, probably someone will devise a way of
using this too. Say like, analysing the blog patterns for various blogs (provided
everyone shared their blogtimes) .. or like finding out a true blogomaniac,
a person who blogs all day... Nevertheless the resulting graphic looks cool. Check it out -
Read More (1043 words) »»
