Getting Serious with Movable Type
New Movable Type sites are always a source of excitement for us here at Six Apart, but there are a number of other reasons why the launch of Serious Eats, a destination for food-lovers, has us licking our lips.
Ed Levine — author of New York Eats and a contributor to The New York Times, Gourmet, and Bon Appetit — has brought together an all-star team of bloggers and web designers and paired them up with a solid roster of chefs, celebrities, and cooking enthusiasts. The goal: To form a lively community centered around making, eating and celebrating delicious food. Obviously, that’s something we can all get behind. (Editor’s note: Anything that launches with featured articles about pie, chocolate, and pizza automatically has my cursor hovering near the “subscribe” link.)
The site seamlessly combines written content, still photos, and high-quality video segments, a trend that is now past the “gee whiz” phase and well on its way to being a common feature. As you can imagine (and millions of cable television viewers can attest), the medium is made for talking about food. They’ve already run pieces showing Susie Essman chatting over lunch with Jeffrey Steingarten, Meg Hourihan braising chicken wings with Daniel Boulud, and an interview with a Memphis restauranteur who deep-fries hamburgers in 90-year-old grease. If variety is any kind of spice, Serious Eats is on track to be extremely flavorful. And that’s just the videos. Beyond the clips, you’ll find feature articles, reader roundtables, and aggregation of great food blog posts from around the Web.
And while Serious Eats is clearly technologically advanced, that’s not the story. Even the platforms the site is built on — Brightcove for video and Movable Type Enterprise for content management — and the consultants that helped put it together — Apperceptive — aren’t really the story. People enjoying food is the story, with the technology happily tucked away in the kitchen.
That said, here’s a peek into the back of the house: The bulk of Serious Eats, with feature articles, hosted and aggregated blog posts, reader message boards, video integration, and advertising across the site, was put together in about three weeks.
Ed’s love of food has been a lifelong affair, and we hear that there are already hours and hours of video “in the can,” but the site itself came together in remarkably little time. That’s exciting in and of itself. That Movable Type Enterprise, with all of its power, remains a great tool for rapid deployment. We’ve always based Six Apart’s products on the idea of decreasing the friction for updating content, but as anyone who’s ever launched a major online effort can attest, getting to the starting line can feel like a marathon in and of itself. By cutting down on the time it takes to go from brilliant idea to “Hello, world,” you can save valuable energy for all the serious work of building a community of readers and finding out what they want to see, what they want to say, and, in this case, what they want to eat.
Do you have a Movable Type success story? We’ve been talking about great TypePad sites every day, and while we’ve long used this space to trumpet the accomplishments of bloggers, businesses, and developers who use MT, we’ve going to redouble our efforts to shine the spotlight on our amazing customers.
If you’ve got a great story to tell about your Movable Type site, just drop us a quick note. We love seeing and sharing Movable Type success stories as much as Ed Levine loves bacon. Mmm, bacon.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Getting Serious with Movable Type.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.movabletype.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/73
Leave a comment