Are you a talented designer or someone looking for the perfect look for your blog? Look no further!

Thanks to the efforts of Movable Type community members Arvind Satyanarayan, Elise Bauer and Jesse Gardner, The Style Contest for Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal has launched!

You can read more about it on the ProNet weblog announcement but suffice it to say that the Movable Type Style Library will soon be brimming with gorgeous creations from talented designers the world over.

If you're a designer, you absolutely shouldn't miss a shot at part of the prizes, worth over $17,000, donated by the contest's sponsors (Six Apart, Adobe and StyleMaster) and a shot to get your design in front of the owners of over ten million blogs.

We at Six Apart have always placed a high importance on aesthetics and design so we're naturally overjoyed that members of our community not only feel the same but put such work into making the blogosphere a more beautiful place. Go check out The Style Contest and you'll see what we mean.

Okay, maybe you’ve got a great sense of style. Then why is your Movable Type blog still using one of the default designs? It’s time to make something that actually communicates a little bit about your own sense of aesthetics.

The good news is, you don’t have to dig into learning CSS or anything fancy just to make a nice-looking site. Try out Arvind Satyanarayan’s Movable Type Style Generator: It works great with the default templates in Movable Type 3.2.

Using the Style Generator, you can create a new design with 1, 2 or 3 columns and your own personal color scheme with just a few clicks. There’s a sample blog that lets you see your changes live as you make them, and if you want to change your style, you just replace your stylesheet with the code that the Generator gives you. The best part is that Arvind only asks for a measly five bucks if you use the service. Of course, you could be a cheapskate and generate your styles for free, but donating will make you feel good, and even better, will make your blogs look great.

A few months ago, Peter Merholz wrote a post on his blog called “Eating away from below, which was a smart and interesting take on how nimbler, easier, more social software is going to start succeeding in large businesses. Peter is partially responsible (well, actually, it’s all his fault) for coining the word blog, and he’s been extremely influential with his work at Adaptive Path and on his eight (!) year old blog, so we tend to listen to what he says. Here’s the gist of it:

[T]he most obvious trend is that the enterprise software market is being eaten away from below. My favorite case in point is Movable Type, the software which enables me to publish this blog. With a few modifications, it enabled Adaptive Path to publish it’s site. And then, as this post makes clear, with a fair bit of modification, it powers the site for SEED Magazine. What this demonstrates is what we’ve known all along — Movable Type isn’t a blog publishing tool — it’s a lightweight content management system. Blog publishing was essentially a trojan horse toward rethinking how to enable publishing on the Web. In my world, content management systems (CMSes) have long been the enterprise software that has been the biggest pain in the ass to deal with. Typically modified from document management systems, these tools were big, bloated, unwieldy, expensive, and, most importantly, ill-suited to the task of publishing on the Web. What Movable Type did was start with the simple, and focus on supporting a true web-native genre, and then build up from there as need be.

There’s a lot more smart thinking in Peter’s post, including some parts that are less self-serving for us here at Six Apart, as well as some great challenging comments, so it’s well worth a read. You can check out more of Peter’s thinking at Adaptive Path’s site, which of course is powered by Movable Type. It’s ideas like these that have really helped us shape and evolve our thinking in developing Movable Type Enterprise.

A few months ago we tipped you all off on a big plugin directory update with fourteen new plugins many of which have been built upon the powerful Movable Type 3.2 architecture.

Today, we're writing to tell you about eight more useful additions as well as updates to two previously published ones. Below is a list of those plugins with descriptions written by the developers:

• Blacklist Connector for MT 3.2
  This plugin acts as a "connector" between MT-Blacklist and Movable Type 3.2, allowing to use Blacklist with MT 3.2. The connector assigns junk scores instead of deleting items.
• Webiki
  Wiki words for MovableType. Put a Wiki word in the keywords of a post and have the word auto-linked to that post in other posts. Also supports tags for enumerating Wiki words and posts with Wiki words.
• HMPassphrase
  Implements simple passphrase-based spam comment rejection
• GeoLocation
  Geo Location is a plug-in to enable blog entries to contain geo-location information. It is based on Yuri Takhteyev's entry location plugin. Geo Location is part of the Locative Blog project.
• DynamicSmartyPants
  Translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities in dynamic templates.
• The Socializer
  MT Socialize is a simple, one-tag plugin to allow easy interface to Pierre Far's Socializer Service, allowing you to easily submit a link to several social bookmarking systems. Instead of having a link to each social bookmarking website, you have a single link to all of them!
• Lowdown
  Lowdown removes extra information to display plain text only. It converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, strips HTML tags, and changes line breaks to spaces. Similar to dirify but without the underscores, and usable for much longer blocks of text. This can be helpful when generating some types of feeds (eg. iCAL, RSS).
• FormatList
  FormatList is a plugin that makes it easy to create bulleted or numbered lists when creating or editing entries.
• CloudNine 2 (Update!)
  This plugin allows users to generate a weighted category cloud.
• MTGoogleMaps 3 (Update!)
  MTGoogleMaps is a plugin that enables you embed Google Maps in your weblog entries and templates.

As always we're excited to have these additions and the new functionality they add to what is already the most powerful and extensible blogging software application. If you have a plugin you'd like to let the world know about, submitting it to the Plugin directory is the best way to do that.

Finally, to all of the Professional Network developers who surprise us constantly with their level of ingenuity, creativity and talent: Thank you for making Movable Type a better for the rest of us.

UPDATE: Those of you who subscribe to the Plugin Directory feed will also be happy to know that the feed now contains ALL of the information found on the plugin entry page. Little steps towards perfection...

Wells Fargo, headquartered here in San Francisco, has designed a commemorative blog for the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of our fair city. With first-hand accounts of the earthquake put into their historical context, and links on disaster preparedness, Wells Fargo's new Movable Type blog explains their mission and experience in helping with the recovery in 1906, and how you can be ready today.

You can read Steve Rubel's post on it here.

Congratulations to Wells Fargo for being the first US bank to blog!