Blog News & Articles

Among the 7 Ways to Blog Using Your Mobile Phone, which we wrote back in 2009, a few of them included emailing your posts directly to your blog. But what if everything you wrote, posted and created came only from your email? Well, then you’d have Posterous.

Today marks the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics hosted in Vancouver, Canada. No time to sit in front of the tube all day watching the events? Well luckily for you they will be covered almost exclusively by Facebook and Twitter.

There’s even a list of verified tweeting athletes. Fans can also check out Twitter-Athletes, a site that organizes lists of athletes in other sports who use the service and it links directly to Winter Olympic Tweets.

On Facebook, the IOC has created an Olympic Games Page, which already has more than a million followers. The page plans to feature updates and photos from athletes.

Despite some earlier confusion about rules governing social media at the Olympics, Bob Condron, Director of Media Services for the United States Olympic Committee says that "Athletes are free to blog during the Games," adding that "…Twitter is just a blog that's written 140 characters at a time."

And though an official Olympic hashtag has yet to be announced, consensus among many bloggers says that #Van2010 is the way to go.

So go ahead, cheer on your favorite Olympic athletes. From curlers to ice dancers to biathletes, here’s hoping it’s the 2010 games FTW.

Looks like Twitter (news, site) and its 140 character limit was not enough. Another upcoming social site/micro-post vendor called Whispurr wants you to expand your character limit horizons, while keeping it simple.

Today is definitely a day for new and updated releases. The most recent play was made by the Six Apart team (news, site), who last night announced that they’re moving on to bigger and better numbers when it comes to Movable Type. That is, Movable Type 4.3 Beta is now open to the public.

Some key points to keep in mind with the release:

• This version has most of 4.3's new features, including comment pagination and a new entry asset manager.
• The first release is an alpha (MTOS-4.3a1) and 2 more releases are expected during the beta period. The final release will reportedly be in 3 weeks.
• Six Apart urges you to remember this is alpha software and is not intended for use in a production environment.
• Reference documentation has been overhauled for this release. Nearly 100 pages have already been updated, and you can expect more info on this topic soon, including ways in which you can get involved

A detailed look into this teaser is available on the Movable Type 4.3 Beta page here, where you'll also find links to download the platform. Take it for a test drive and let us (and maybe even Six Apart, too) know what you think.

Following just days after the release of the optional Movable Type v4.26 release, Six Apart has announced another update to the blogging and social media platform. Apparently a few bugs and some performance related database schema changes slipped through the 4.26 cracks.

Key changes in version 4.261 include:

• The Schema Version is now updated to 4.00071, which was omitted in 4.26. This change will only affect users who have already upgraded to Movable Type 4.26, not those on 4.25 and below. The schema change adds indexes to several tables.
• A typo in a 4.26 commit where a user clicks the Cancel button on the Display Options flyout did not necessarily cancel the user's actions; the 4.261 fix corrects this behavior.
• Fixed the Schwartz (MT's job queuing system) error exposed as a result of a previous 4.26 commit: 'Can't call method "registry" on an undefined value at lib/MT/Component.pm line 558 during global destruction'.

Reminder: What You Got in v4.26

In case you missed our previous coverage, here's what came with the MT 4.26 update. Remember, this release was labeled as optional by Six Apart, but we'd say that it's a must have for anyone who's flexing the platform's muscle in a meaningful way.

Bug Fixes

Aside from resolving some bugs that got through the 4.25 QA process (or were deemed too insignificant), this release was all about improving existing features — no templates or plug-ins are affected. Breath sigh of relief now.

Probably one of the biggest crowd pleasers is a fix to how lists of articles were filtered by category name. Users can now parse categories within a mt:Entries tag that include whitespace or logical operators. This bug was actually introduced in version 4.25 and made a lot of people unhappy. So for much of the user base, this is a welcome update.

Here are a few more of the bug fixes (view them all here):

• Fixes to Backup and Restore
• Fixes to a bug where the comment response did not return users to the entry
• The method for parsing the categories within an mt:Entries tag has been fixed
• Security fix for mt-wizard.cgi (this is a non-critical security fix)

Performance Enhancements

Movable Type 4.26 is a recommended update for Enterprise 4.x customers is related to the performance fixes. Specifically, there are fixes to the database indices to improve query speed which should improve search significantly and improved reliability and performance of MT's open source job queuing system, TheSchwartz.

Other low-level changes that are said to improve performance include fixes to metadata saving and unnecessary reloading of the configuration while running MT under FastCGI.

Downloading the Update

You can download Movable Type 4.261 now, but as usual, make backups before applying any changes and read the release notes to make sure this is a fix you or your clients really need.

Now on their third beta release, the WordPress team is promising big things with version 2.7. After completing the first round of bug fixes from the beta 1 and beta 2 releases, the WordPress team is making sure that the full public release is a quality release with minimal issues.

We reported recently about the slowed growth of the blogging industry. A new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project may shed some additional light on the subject.

The study reported that networked workers, those who use the Internet or email at work — which is 62% of American adults — said such technologies are a “mixed blessing for them.” Reading blogs at work was reported by only 11% of those surveyed. A mere 2% of the employed Internet users said they blog at work.

Blogging is a great way to be social online, to extend your influence and to build community. Most of you already know these things. But we’re all busy people and this is a rapidly evolving sphere. So the following question is nearly always pertinent and worth revisiting: Are you using your blog most effectively?

Toronto-based content management consulting outfit The Rockley Group pride themselves on being at the forefront of developments in our dear little CM field.

Helping to ensure that they stay ahead of the pack and on top of your RSS reader, the Rockley Blog was unwrapped a couple months back. This elegant, uncluttered site features up to date news, announcements and commentary on CMS related issues; reports from recent conferences; and plenty of advice for managers of content-heavy enterprises.

It’s been almost a year since Google acquired JotSpot, a publishing and collaboration company founded in 2004 by the Excite.com co-founders.

Since the announcement, new customer registration has not been allowed and the service has gone stagnant.

But recent whispering on the Web points toward Google re-launching the wiki service sometime in the near future.

We’ve said for awhile now that the European CMS market is cluttered with a menagerie of small and mid-sized contenders. Overall, however, it awaits the arrival of a real rallying gem.

To gauge whether a vendor meets that higher call, we can typically look at the impact it’s made on both enterprise and education.

Enterprise-wise, Ireland-based ECM firm TERMINALFOUR showed some classy color with Site Manager 5.3. And now it’s making waves in the latter category, too.