January 2007 Archives

After our post the other day about blogging with Office 2007 and Movable Type Enterprise, we got some great conversations started about what it takes to help businesses start blogs in general.

One of the most exciting was Isabel Wang’s column at Web Host Industry Review, entitled “Six Apart: We Won’t Be Happy Until Every Company Can Have a Blog” It’s true! And Isabel’s one of the smartest thinkers in the web hosting business, so she offers some really useful insights for web hosts. Smart thinking always begets intelligent conversation, as evidenced by the first comment, in which John McKown outlines the challenge nicely:

1. Most people that aren’t techies don’t see the value in blogging yet. They see it is as a fad and a bit of a waste of their time.
2. Many businesses still see blogs as a potential liability.
3. Many laypeople that I meet think that a blog is too large of a commitment for their time to keep a blog up.
4. Many people hear FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) spread by the mass media about blogs, and they assume that bloggers are people with too much time on their hands.

And those are exactly the same concerns and fears that we hear while explaining blogs to companies. Combine that with some current bloggers’ unwillingness to embrace new kinds of blogging (“Blogging from Office? That’s lame!”) and we’ve all got our work cut out for us.

I talk a little bit about that work over on the E-consultancy site. In the interview, I was asked a bit about ” Why should a small business consider devoting precious resources to a blog, rather than other web marketing tools…?” and was pretty pleased with how the answer turned out:

The best reason for a small business to create and maintain a blog is because it’s the most cost-effective method of maintaining a relationship with important audiences like customers, potential customers, partners, or employees. A blog doesn’t need to be run in place of other tools - it can easily complement them. For example, many companies post the content from their email newsletters on their blogs, making the most of the content while also allowing for a level of interactivity and discoverability that email alone doesn’t provide.

We’re excited that such a great conversation has started around what it’s going to take to get every business blogging. What we’re clear about so far is that we need to tell more stories of success, and spend less time hyping scare stories or worrying about whether people are blogging the “right” way. Let’s get ‘em all started, and then help improve those business blogs once they’re up and running.

Have you ever seen those t-shirts with a tuxedo printed on the front of them? I’m pretty sure the vibe that guys are going for when they wear them is, “Hey look, I’m classy but fun!” Unfortunately, the message that comes across is, “I want to seem like I’m presentable, but without having to actually exert any effort!”

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s worth mentioning because the same thing happens in software. Making a t-shirt can be fun, easy, even attractive. But it’s not the same thing as getting fitted for a real suit. (I learned the difference by reading blogs like the Movable Type-powered English Cut.) Making something that’s cool and fun isn’t the same as making something that’s durable, reliable, and ready for formal occasions.

Which brings us, in a somewhat roundabout fashion, to blogging. We’ve been working on Movable Type for a long time — more than half a decade. When we started, simply making cool stuff was enough. But as we’ve worked to make a reliable business tool, we sometimes have to make choices that balance coolness with reliability. For example, a few years ago, people really, really wanted support for Daypop and Blogdex built in to the platform. Those requests are… somewhat less common today. Fashion can be fickle. You can dress up your Hanes crew-neck, but you won’t be fooling anybody.

(There’s some kind of story here about plugins being like the Bedazzler for your t-shirt blog, but this analogy is getting kind of painful already, isn’t it?)

Still, sometimes you just want to throw on a t-shirt; It’s good enough for hanging out with your friends. And that’s why we’ve got different versions of Movable Type. Movable Type Enterprise is designed to be that custom-tailored suit, perfectly integrated with all your other professional tools. And at the other extreme is the free personal version of MT: No limits on what you can do with it, but probably not the one to use if you’re, say, talking to the Dalai Lama.

We figured it was worth taking the time to explain why we’ve got a few different versions of Movable Type, appropriate for whatever you’re doing. And we’ll talk a little bit more in the future about how we can make the personal versions of MT a little more human, a little cooler, while still keeping MT Enterprise a rock-solid, predictable platform.

So, if you’ve ever wondered whether the same wardrobe can support high fashion and just hanging out with friends, fret not. But if you think one size fits all and that you can just throw on a t-shirt and pretend it’s a tux… you might want to reevaluate your sartorial selections.

Update: Thanks to Mena for a quick correction — tuxedo t-shirts are totally okay for cute little dogs like Rudy, who is one of our favorite Six Apart office dogs. Sorry, Rudy!

Today, Microsoft is making some of their biggest announcements ever -- if you're even remotely interested in technology news, you're going to hear about the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. But what you might not know is that these new milestones mark the first time that blogging can really be integrated between Movable Type Enterprise and two of the most popular software platforms in the world.

To be honest, Windows and Office aren't always known for being the most cutting-edge platforms. But at Six Apart, we've got some very cool demos about ways that you can connect these decades-old platforms to the latest innovations in blogging. And you might be surprised to see that even some people who work at Microsoft are using these tools themselves.

Some background: A year ago, we showed off some cool ideas about blogging with Office at the MIX06 conference that Microsoft held in Las Vegas. (There's even video online -- just skip past the showgirl and the Elvis impersonator.) Now the technology demo we showed off last year is something that you can actually deploy.

You see, we’re not gonna be happy until every company can have a blog. To get everybody using blogs at work, we have to connect with the tools people are already using. Some of that's already happened -- you can use Movable Type Enterprise with your Oracle database or build templates in Adobe's Dreamweaver. But the big Kahuna of office apps is Office. And Office 2007 is surprisingly good, so it makes it even more attractive to plug it in to the power of blogs.

Okay, enough talk. Let’s see what blogging with MT Enterprise and Office 2007 looks like:

• Post to your Movable Type blog right from Microsoft Word. How well does this work? You’re reading a post created in Word 2007 right now.

• Publish your Movable Type blog posts in Microsoft Word format. We’ve been talking about this idea for years, but imagine the potential – if you’ve got a guy in your office who is afraid of blogs but just wants to get his information delivered on his desk in the format he’s used to, now you can do that. What about just publishing each category archive as a Word document, so you can have a single file with all the information about that topic?
• Support for feeds in Outlook 2007. There are tons of things you can do with feeds that get more powerful in Outlook – every tag has its own feed in MT Enterprise, and of course every blog does, too. But you can make feeds across all the blogs in your system, so you can do cool things like having every post tagged “important” go into a single folder in Outlook, where you can make a macro to turn them into to-dos.
• And lots more. There’s all kinds of other opportunities with the new Microsoft platforms. OpenSearch support in IE7 lets you automatically perform searches of your intranet blogs right in your browser. XML-based formats for PowerPoint and Excel mean you can actually pull in live data from your blogs into presentations or spreadsheets. And we’re sure the best stuff hasn’t even been thought of yet.

More of this kind of integration is on the way; Movable Type Enterprise already integrates with platforms like Microsoft’s SQL Server. But we wanted to make sure that, amidst all the other news of the day, nobody misses the fact that two of the most popular software platforms around are finally ready for business when it comes to blogs.

Last night we released version 3.34 of the Movable Type Publishing Platform. Movable Type 3.34:

• Fixes important potential XSS vulnerabilities
• Is a free and recommended update for all Movable Type users
• Enables simple use of FastCGI which yields a 15x performance increase

We encourage all of our users and customers to upgrade to this latest release of Movable Type because it addresses a hand full of important XSS security vulnerabilities. In addition to security enhancements, this release introduces a feature enhancement that has increased application performance for a number of users by over an order of magnitude.

Sign in to your Movable Type account. to download this free update.

We have been educating users for some time about the benefits of hosting Movable Type under FastCGI, a free and light weight persistent hosting environment for web applications. However, prior to Movable Type 3.34, FastCGI support could only be achieved by applying a number of patches to the MT source code. In 3.34, however, those patches are no longer necessary; FastCGI support has been fully integrated into the core application. Now Movable Type is capable of detecting when it is running under FastCGI automatically and take advantage of its unique performance benefits without the user or the system administrator needing to do a thing.

Because of the profound performance benefits of FastCGI and the security fixes made in Movable Type 3.34 we encourage all users to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type as soon as possible.

Keep reading to learn more about the specific benefits of Fast CGI and to find resources that will help you install and setup FastCGI on your system.

Jakob Nielsen’s a smart guy, and has been one of the leading advocates for usability on the web for more than 10 years. But even smart guys can be slow to pick up on obvious ideas, so it was good to see an idea pop up in his (generally excellent) article on the best intranets of 2007:

Intranets tend to avoid the over-hyped fads that wash across the Web. Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of “what I did on my last date.” Microsoft even has a blog for its intranet’s managing editor to discuss features and news coverage.

It’s great to note the increasing adoption of intranet blogs — that’s one of the main scenarios that people use Movable Type Enterprise for, which might explain why Movable Type Enterprise has seen such rapid adoption. But it’s a little odd to see people still dragging out the old “people like to blog about their lunch!” bit.

So, we’ll repeat it one more time: Blogs are a communications tool, just like email instant messaging, and SMS. That means they can be used to talk about, yes, what I did on my last date. (You might wanna use Vox for that, so you can restrict your post and your boss can’t see it.) But when I’m at work? I blog about our customers, partners, and internal projects, the same stuff I talk about on email and IM when I’m at work. That’s what you’ll be using your business blogs for as well. Call it “emphasizing useful information.”

On Friday, we looked at how Cisco was doing a great job of using their blog to talk about their side of a lawsuit. It’s amazing enough to see lawyers talking in real-time about a suit in progress, but it’s even better when an organization is open enough to have their President talk about the details of business.

But that kind of openness is what you’d expect from Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Corporation and director for the Mozilla Foundation. Her post a few weeks ago offers a look at the organization’s finances that’s as open as Mozilla’s beloved Firefox and Thunderbird software.

The introduction alone is succinct, eloquent, and compelling:

Mozilla is a global community dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere. We do this by building great software - such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird mail client - that helps people interact with the Internet. We build great software by building communities. Our software is “open source software.” The source code is available to everyone; as a result people are able to work together and we all share the results of the combined efforts. The Mozilla project has been building software and communities since 1998. The Mozilla Foundation recently completed its financial audit and filed its tax returns for 2005. The tax returns should appear on Guidestar shortly, and in any case these materials are available directly from the Foundation. Because the steady revenue stream is so important to our long term sustainability I’ll give an overview here.

We’re thrilled that so many members of the Mozilla team use Six Apart platforms like Movable Type to help tell their stories to the world. (And of course, many of us here at Six Apart use Firefox, which is one of our preferred browsers for all of our services.) We’ve also tried to help out in a few different ways, ranging from contributing patches to Firefox or by designing to web standards when we make our applications.

But the kind of success that Mozilla has had doesn’t happen without an extraordinary community, and exceptional posts like Mitchell’s show how blogs can be a key part of growing a supportive, successful community.

We’d praised Cisco for adopting blogs a few months ago, but I don’t think any of us suspected just how great a job they’d do of understanding the medium and really embracing it.

While most of us were busy being Apple fanboys after the announcement of the iPhone (Macworld takes place down the street from Six Apart’s offices, so it’s quite possible that they put something in the drinking water), there were only a few mentions of the fact that Cisco owns the name. Then, word leaked out that a lawsuit was pending, and most of us would expect some boring one-sentence platitudes to get leaked out through News.com over the next few months as the lawsuit dragged on.

But Cisco’s made a really surprising, and very smart move: They’ve posted an honest and intelligent update on their blog, outlining their reasons for the suit and explaining their very reasonable position:

I was surprised and disappointed when Apple decided to go ahead and announce their new product with our trademarked name without reaching an agreement. It was essentially the equivalent of “we’re too busy.” Despite being very close to an agreement, we had no substantive communication from Apple after 8pm Monday, including after their launch, when we made clear we expected closure. What were the issues at the table that kept us from an agreement? Was it money? No. Was it a royalty on every Apple phone? No. Was it an exchange for Cisco products or services? No. Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen—it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That’s it. Openness and clarity.

Mark Chandler, Cisco’s SVP and General Counsel, speaks in the first person with a matter-of-fact tone of voice, and it’s enough to overcome the skepticism of even the most diehard fanboy. Impressive work, and it really shows the impact a couple of Movable Type-powered blogs can have on the way a company communicates with its community.

One of our main goals for Movable Type for 2007 is to make sure our community’s feedback is an even more integral part of product development. As a first step, we’re experimenting with getting your help fixing the plugin experience for Movable Type.

There have been hundreds of Movable Type plugins created by our developer community over the past five years. With so many plugins to choose from we want to make it as easy as possible for our users to find, select and install the most popular and most essential plugins for their Movable Type installation. And if you’ve been using Movable Type for a while, older plugins might be obsolete or built in to newer versions of the platform, so we want to make sure you’re getting the best performance out of your blog.

To help us understand which plugins are most popular across the thousands of Movable Type-powered blogs around the world, we’ve created a simple survey that we hope you’ll help us complete. The information from this survey will be used to help us to improve the quality of our Plugin Directory as well as to plan for future releases.

Take the Movable Type Plugin Survey »

Details

• The survey will remain open for approximately 30 days at which time we will publish the results.
• Please only take the survey once. If you manage multiple Movable Type installations, please take the survey once for every instance you manage.

Thanks so much for helping us improve Movable Type!