January 2006 Archives
Many of us at Six Apart are really big technology geeks, so some of the biggest indirect influences on our work are the endless inventions of Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. PARC is credited with inventing technologies such as laser printers, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and many more. Naturally, they’re at the forefront of using new technologies like blogs as well.
The best public example of their embrace of blogging is the Movable Type-powered PlayOn blog from the PARC team researching the social impacts of massively multiplayer online games.
The work the PlayOn team does in understanding community, social architecture, interactions and culture makes them a natural fit for participating in the blogosphere, where conversation is focused around feedback and interaction. A look at the profiles of the blog’s authors shows a very diverse list of influences and experiences have informed their current work. It’s eye-opening to see how their research into games that seem simple at first glance can reveal some very telling information about how people relate to each other in general, especially online.
Of course, you don’t need to be an expert researcher to get started with Movable Type. It’s easy to collect feedback just by using the built-in commenting features or by tracking who links to your blog. And once you’ve discovered some insights into your own community, you can easily document your own findings and research, whether it’s simple updates to a project or inventing the Next Big Thing like the team at PARC.
CMS Watch has published a terrific article by Tony Byrne entitled Is There a Gremlin in Your Website?, which explains in depth the benefits of publishing static web pages.
Now, if you’re not worried about the technical details, it’s okay: Movable Type’s supported dynamic and static pages for years, and you can continue using either or both together depending on your preferences. But if you’re using Movable Type and want to learn more, the good news is that you’ve already got access to all the power of static pages by default, without having to tweak or install any plugins or extensions.
Byrne’s included a great list of some of the benefits this publishing architecture offers:
- Static pages get delivered faster.
- Static pages are easier to index.
- Static pages show a better face to external search engines.
- Meaningful file names improve usability.
- No need to worry about database uptime.
- Static pages are actually quite mobile.
If you rely on your blog for your business or your reputation, it’s worth understanding why static pages may be a smart choice. Movable Type’s publishing power can keep you connected to the audience you care about without ever fearing they’ll face an inscrutable “error establishing a database connection” or a slow-loading page for your most popular content.
There’s other benefits, too, of course. A flexible templating system means you can do powerful things like generating Microsoft Word documents or slideshows or even PDF files. And of course, there’s infinite potential in what you can create with just XHTML and CSS, especially using common tools like Adobe GoLive and Dreamweaver, which both support creating Movable Type templates right within the tool.
In all, Movable Type’s publishing system is one of the most flexible parts of the platform, and understanding the benefits of its options can help you get the most out of the sites you use to communicate.
Reuters has published a look at the presence of bloggers at Sundance, the popular independent film festival held each year in Park City, Utah.
The article states, “As befits its indie roots, the Sundance Film Festival has long played host to innovations that have spread elsewhere”, and many of the blogs mentioned do a great job of demonstrating that potential. Prominently mentioned is indieWIRE’s extensive family of blogs, all powered by Movable Type 3.2.
And indieWire’s blog index also links out to other prominent bloggers in the film community, many of which are also publishing their own takes on Sundance. There’s GreenCine’s GreenCine Daily, The Hot Blog from Movie City News, and Hollywood Elsewhere. Each of these sites shows how professional-level bloggers can strengthen the reach of their work not just by taking advantage of Movable Type’s features, but also by linking to each other and forming a community that raises everyone’s profile.
As we’ve mentioned in the past, the film industry has been making good use of blogs for some time, resulting in some well-documented direct benefits. And the benefits of blogging aren’t just for independent film — these days most major studio releases (such as Rent or the upcoming Rocky Balboa movie) are accompanied by offical blogs, a trend well-documented by blogs like Movie Marketing Update.
Of course, whether you’re a filmmaker or just a film fan, it’s easy to get started with Movable Type and participate in the movie blog community yourself.
Earthlink is one of the most popular ISPs on the planet, and though they've dabbled in blogging before, they're really hitting their stride with Earthling, their new Movable Type-powered blog.
In the post detailing where the Earthling blog came from, there's a compelling set of goals:
Get readers. Be useful to them. Write about EarthLink's projects, culture, and people. Write about what interests you on the web. Help people learn to use the technologies around them. Have conversations, and engage with people.
It's a great manifesto for any business blog to follow. And Earthling makes effective use of many of Movable Type's most powerful features. There's comments and TrackBacks enabled on every entry for feedback and interactivity with Earthlink's community. Web feeds for all the entries are of course automatically generated. Flexible category archiving is used to organize posts and to make per-category feeds available, and Movable Type's plugins make it easy to include Flickr images that are appropriately tagged.
In addition to all the technical features, Earthlink has hired a dedicated blogger, Dave Coustan, who helps ensure that the blog has a strong human voice. It's also a good sign that Earthlink as a company is invested in having the best blog content possible.
Earthlink's long helped people get online and make the most of the web, and now the company can help businesses get the most out of the web by acting as a role model for business blogging. We'll be watching to see how Earthling continues to make the most out of Movable Type in the future.
