Blogging News & Articles

In an age of instant messaging, you should take a lot more than an instant to consider what exactly it is you’re communicating.

Jan 16 saw the release of Movable Type 3.34, a semi-distant point release which promises to fix some concerning XSS vulnerabilities and more notably delivers accessible scalability derived from the leveraging of FastCGI.

FastCGI, while meaningless to most of you and perhaps a little reminiscent of the late 90’s for the other 2%, handily increases Movable Type (MT) performance by something on the order of 15x. Woot MT geeks! And more to that, the new version is a free update for all legit MT users.

Recently in WebProNews, Gobala Krishnan explains how Wordpress (an open-source blogging tool) can be expanded to function as a more complete Web or Intranet CMS. It’s all a matter of having clear goals and the right plugins, and partnering with the right services, he says.

This might be a viable option for smaller organizations with specific web/intranet content management needs — or an intermediate option for companies already using WordPress on their web sites or intranet, but which are still searching for a broader WCM solution.

One of the most intriguing angles explored is expanding WordPress to serve as a multimedia training site.

The second update to WordPress has been released, and in just a 10 day period. This is no miracle of agile development. Rather, v2.0.7 is a quick hit patch that addresses both security issues arising in some versions of the base PHP platform and an integration issue known as the “FeedBurner Bug”. The update is recommended for anyone running WordPress 2.0.6 or lower.

WordPressors, time to get downloading. Your favorite open source Blogging platform has been updated for the last time before the 2.1 release, according to Matthew Mullenweg.

Announced without a lot of fanfare yesterday was Six Apart’s latest version of their enterprise blogging platform.

Movable Type Enterprise (MTE), a souped-up version of 6A’s commercial blogging platform, has just turned one-point-five. Still, some say MTE is just glossy packaging, the “E” word, and an inflated price tag. Perhaps, perhaps not. By and by the “E” (for Enterprise) is being earned and despite the nay sayers, there is a place for Enterprise Blogging software.

Out of the box Movable Type’s (MT) search engine isn’t terrible. It meets minimum requirements, is fairly accurate, but not much more. The big issue is performance. Under any sort of load, MT’s native search starts to creak and groan, and suck gobs of CPU time.

Enter Mark Carey and his latest version of Fast Search for MT.

Today the maker of the ever famous blogging software MovableType has annouced a Business Blogging initiative with solutions for a number of organization types and industries. The foundation: either their Movable Type or their hosted TypePad software.

Learn more.

If I’ve got my sums right, Movable Type 1.0 was release 4 years ago tomorrow. Hey we don’t scribble on Saturdays (most of the time), so this is going out today.

Here’s a big thank you to Ben and Mina, Anil, and to the ever essential community that have made MT much more than just a technology. Its been a fantastic ride. Its been inspirational work all around. We’re very pleased to play a small part. We’re excited about the future you’ve helped create.

Happy Birthday MT.

This post was authored in FireFox and so far, with good reason. After not so lengthy a pursuit, we have yet to find a blogging client (free or commercial) with the features and usability that inspire us to click the browser to the curb and start authoring from a desktop app.

As it turns out, we might have better luck if OSX is what we called home, but being Win32 geeks, we do tend to drag that perspective around with us.

Perl is great, but then only when someone else is programming it. During today's investigation with the new MT 3.1 code tree and with great pleasure, I delved into the "mt/php" directory.

Dynamic Pages are a feature of MT 3.1. They are implemented with PHP. What I did not realize previously is that the good blogging folk at Six Apart had done what appears to be a nearly complete port of MT from Perl (bless it) to PHP. This port appears to include support for all current MT tags, it relies on Justin Vincent's ezSQL DB library and Smarty templates, and even supports a plug-in API.

An enterprising young Neil Turner of York, United Kingdom has posted a review of the recently released Movable Type 3.0 Developers Edition.

Neil steers far clear of the recent outcry (whining) about MT's new licensing model (What? Pay for software?). He also doesn't dig too far under the covers with regards to technical changes for MT 3.0.

What he does do is give a very nice overview of the new publishing interface and features. He also takes a little scare out of the prospect of upgrading.

Read the review.

The question that was posed to me recently was: "Can I use Movable Type as a Web CMS solution?" My answer: "Yes, but...".

Movable Type is the prolific blogging tool produced by Ben and Mena Trott, the dynamic duo running Silicon Valley's SixApart. Its also the technology behind this and 1000's of other websites.